Dear GWSS Prac. Students,
wow, Friday was really something else. I really felt like the work our group did was powerful and productive. What I gathered is the following:
Projects to pursue:
a video viewing system for women
Mothering along a continuum from being a young new mother to mothering children who are grown
the expansion of parenting classes and resources for parents and children (Gas fare, stationary, phone money)
The creation and production of a panel on mothering where all of the different voices related to childhood, childrearing, and mothering from prison can be heard and perhaps shared with the public.
This might even be in the form of a public reading-the inside students could write monologues and the outside students could share them? Or maybe we can film or record the voices of people who would make up the panel and make a CD or an MP3 that we could share.
Some Facts from:
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/64
- (2008 - parents in prison) "The scale of the effects of parental incarceration on children can be revealed simply by statistics showing the number of children with a parent in prison or jail. Among white children in 1980, only 0.4 of 1 percent had an incarcerated parent; by 2008 this figure had increased to 1.75 percent. Rates of parental incarceration are roughly double among Latino children, with 3.5 percent of children having a parent locked up by 2008. Among African American children, 1.2 million, or about 11 percent, had a parent incarcerated by 2008."
Source:Western , Bruce; Pettit, Becky, "Incarceration & social inequality," Dædalus (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Summer 2010), p. 16.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00019 - (2007 - prison population by race and sex) "Similar to men in the general prison population (93%), parents held in the nation's prisons at midyear 2007 were mostly male (92%) (not shown in table). More than 4 in 10 fathers were black, about 3 in 10 were white, and about 2 in 10 were Hispanic (appendix table 2). An estimated 1,559,200 children had a father in prison at midyear 2007; nearly half (46%) were children of black fathers.
"Almost half (48%) of all mothers held in the nation's prisons at midyear 2007 were white, 28% were black, and 17% were Hispanic. Of the estimated 147,400 children with a mother in prison, about 45% had a white mother. A smaller percentage of the children had a black (30%) or Hispanic (19%) mother."
Source:Glaze, Lauren E. and Maruschak, Laura M., "Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children" (Washington, DC: USDOJ, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Jan. 2009), NCJ222984, p. 2.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pptmc.pdf
