Living, Breathing Statistics

So I’ve spent the past week as a camp counselor, hanging out with children and teenagers who have incarcerated parents. The statistics on mass incarceration and recidivism rates in this country are shocking.

• About half of people released from prison will reenter within 3 years
•  72% of people with a parent in prison will end up in prison themselves
•   53% of people in prison have children under the age of 21
•   1 in 30 children in the United States have a parent incarcerated, which is roughly one student for every classroom 

But the more I talk to these kids, living breathing statistics, I realize the reality of the situation: if you have family members in prison, you will probably end up in prison yourself. Like, real talk, some of these kids have siblings in jail, parents, uncles, and aunts all at the same time. Without intervention, it’s only a matter of time for them to end up in prison themselves. Prison culture in the United States is real, and it’s racialized.

Now, I won’t even get into how mass incarceration in the United States is a continuation of the internal colonialism of people of African descent in the United States that started with slavery, but what I do want to touch on is how mass incarceration in the United States is a problem that Americans tend to ignore and pretend doesn’t exist even though:

• ·      with 2.2 million people in prison in the United States, the United States have the highest portion of our population in prison
• ·      we have 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prison population
• ·      1 million out of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, 43%, are African American even though African Americans make up only 12% of the United States population

Yet, prison culture is a topic that usually never comes up in polite conversation and plenty of Americans don’t know anyone in prison. Which means, that for other Americans and their families, prison culture is all around them. These statistics come to life for me when I hear one girl relay a memory from when she was six years old of the cops busting down the door of her house to take away both her mother and father; when I hear a girl I’ve known since she was 10 and is now 15 talk about her brother getting a life sentence at the age of 16 for a crime he didn’t commit (party to a first degree murder); when I hear one of my fellow counselors, a former camper, say she will be the first person in her family to graduate high school; when I hear stories of kids getting passed around to live with one family member then the next; when kids swap stories about when their incarcerated parent will come home this time and what it’s like receiving phone calls from federal prisons; and when I watch year after year, these kids grow and mature and have to come to terms with the knowledge that their family members must have done something terrible to end up in such a place, the knowledge that they might end up there themselves, and that they have more obstacles than most people in this country to achieve the things they want in life. All while struggling with the typical growing pains we all experience as adolescents.

When I hear these things, the statistics transform from numbers on a page to human lives: ripped apart, destroyed, entangled in, and sacrificied to our prison industrial complex. Mass incarceration becomes an issue I cannot politely ignore.