"Nearly 2 million American children— one quarter of them too young to go to kindergarten— now have a parent in prison or jail. To help the littlest ones cope, Sesame Street has just released a toolkit for families faced with losing a parent for what can be years or even decades, including a video featuring a Muppet whose father is locked up. It is titled “Little Children Big Challenges: Incarceration.”...
"The effort to aid youngsters grapple with such a traumatic situation seems admirable, but it raises bigger questions. How did we get to the point where, as Reason’s Mike Riggs recently put it in a post on the toolkit, America has made it “almost normal to have a parent in prison or jail”? And should we really see better tips for caregivers of children with incarcerated parents as the best way to mitigate the harm?...
"Moreover, having a parent in prison is listed by researchers as one of the “adverse childhood experiences [PDF]” that can add up to serious health consequences in adulthood....
"A tremendous amount of this incarceration is unnecessary and could easily be reduced by decriminalizing drug possession, legalizing marijuana, sentencing nonviolent offenders to house arrest and monitoring and only using prison to lock up those whose crimes genuinely warrant it for appropriate amounts of time.
"Of course, what looks obvious from a policy perspective seems almost impossible politically. Perhaps one clue to the depth of problem can be found in the funding for the Sesame Street initiative itself. As the Atlantic reports, one of the major funders is BAE, a major defense contractor that uses prison labor paying workers pennies an hour to cheaply manufacture some of its products. It’s great that Sesame Street gets the support it needs and that BAE is willing to give— but the economics of the prison industry are difficult to disrupt...."
http://healthland.time.com/2013/06/13/viewpoint-whats-missing-from-sesame-streets-parents-in-prison-toolkit/
See also:
Why Is a Defense Contractor Paying for Sesame Street's Parents-in-Jail Lesson?
Helping Little Children Face Big Challenges ... Including a Parent in Prison
http://www.rwjf.org/en/blogs/culture-of-health/2013/06/helping_little_child.html
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