The effects of incarceration are numerous – visible & subtle, long-lasting and comprehensive. Particularly, it is seldom that the majority of us are exposed to the stories of those children whose parents have been locked up. Incarceration affects the families and communities it touches psychologically, emotionally and physically–causing many children to lash out, sustaining this endless cycle of incarceration within the family unit alone.
We punish a child when we lock up her mom.
Huffington Post: “Most Americans take for granted the idea that they will succeed more than their parents did. But recently many studies have shown that Americans are not as socially mobile as their European counterparts. Nowhere are the consequences of that immobility so stark than in the criminal justice system.
Brave New Films’ newest short documentary, Vanessa’s Eight Year Sentence, follows a Bay Area teen with an incarcerated parent who is on the precarious edge of the system herself. When they took her mom away, Vanessa stopped caring. She acted out in school, got in trouble with the law, and ended up in a group home. By the time we met her, her mom only had a year left in her sentence, but Vanessa was one small mistake away from violating her probation and ending up in juvenile hall. Imagine the mother walking out of the walls of prison, only to see her child step in.
This cycle is one of the ways that incarceration becomes mass incarceration, where prison terms seem to be inherited from one generation to the next. Many of our documentaries have taught us that people caught up in the system have often been exposed to it early on, whether you run away from home in Oregon, or you follow your father’s path of addiction and incarceration in the Bronx.
There is way more to the story than “do the crime, do the time.” Vanessa’s mom was convicted of selling drugs and she had prior arrests. Having kids doesn’t grant you clemency in the eyes of the law, but it does mean that when we design a punishment for the parent, we automatically punish the child.”
Read the rest here.
Vanessa’s Eight Year Sentence (documentary featured in article)
