OPINION:
I thought I knew. As someone who served time in prison and runs an organization that works with families and individuals directly impacted by incarceration, I thought I knew how big the problem was. I talk every day to parents who are missing their incarcerated sons and daughters and kids who are missing their incarcerated moms and dads. I knew incarceration touched the lives of a lot of American families, but even I was shocked by the results of a new survey released this week.
The numbers are staggering. According to a ground-breaking new report commissioned by FWD.us, one out of two Americans has had an immediate family member spend at least one night in prison or jail. One in seven has had a family member spend at least a year behind bars. And, perhaps most shocking, one in 34 Americans has had a close family member spend at least 10 years in prison.
I knew prison and jail were a sad reality of life for the families I work with, but I didn’t know that it was real for half of all families in America. When I hear those statistics, I think about the people behind them. I think about kids like Kendall Williams, a 13-year-old boy born months after his father went to prison for a drug charge. He has yet to celebrate a birthday in freedom with his dad. I think about Beth Curtis, who has spent the last 40 years of her life fighting to free her brother, who received a life sentence for marijuana.
To fix the problem of overincarceration, we need to know what we are up against — and this report lays out the effects in clear and disheartening detail. This new report, “Every Second — The Impact of the Incarceration Crisis on American Families,” outlines the extent to which poor families and families of color bear the heaviest burden of prison-reliant policies. Black people are 50 percent more likely than white people to experience family incarceration, and three times as likely to have had a close family member locked up for more than a year. People who make less than $25,000 per year are 61 percent more likely than people earning more than $100,000 to have a family member incarcerated.
Incarceration reaches families in every socioeconomic category. Wealthy families fare better than poorer families, but they are not spared. According to the FWD survey, nearly 40 percent of Americans who earn between $75,000 and $100,000 have had an immediate family member spend at least one night in prison and jail, and nearly 10 percent have had a family member spend at least a year in prison. These findings suggest that while incarceration is a bigger problem for low-income and minority families, it is a problem that can affect all American families.
Why is incarceration a problem, some might ask, if it is needed to protect the public from those who would do us harm? The answer is that we use prisons and jails to lock up a lot more people than just those who pose a serious threat to us, and we lock them up for sentences that are much longer than necessary. That is true of Kendall Williams’ father and Beth Curtis’ brother and tens of thousands of other family members who are locked in state and federal prisons. When we overuse prisons, we hurt families without making us any safer. As the report notes, the decision to send a person to jail or prison affects their immediate family in many ways, including financial stability, physical and mental health, and school outcomes. Knowing these costs should prompt us to use incarceration more sparingly.
Indeed, if there is a silver lining to the report’s otherwise grim conclusions, it can be found in an expression attributed to President Abraham Lincoln: “The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” Perhaps the only way to convince people that we overuse incarceration is to give every family a taste of what it feels like to have a loved one locked up. This new report shows we are getting close, closer than I could have imagined.
• Kevin Ring is president of FAMM, formerly known as Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
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