On Thursday, February 9, 2023, @ 6 p.m. PGP hosted our first webinar of our Spring 2023 Justice Education Series, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. For the spring series, we are partnering with the Center for African American History and Culture at Virginia Union University.
As many of us have come to know, the United States is the global leader in incarceration, as each individual state confines more people than any other whole nation. We also know that of the 6.7 million people under correctional control (2.3 million in jails, prisons, and detention centers and another nearly 5 million on parole or probation), Black people are incarcerated at much higher rates than any other racial/ethnic group and are disproportionately represented in the carceral system compared to their population share. While we often leave our understanding of mass incarceration here, mass imprisonment harms families, too. This is especially the case for Black families and communities: in a 2021 study, 62.9% of Black respondents reported having an incarcerated family member.
During this webinar, our panelists helped us understand the policies and practices that have harmed Black families while also helping us grapple with the impact of mass incarceration on Black families and communities. While we learned about how incarceration produces income loss for families, pushes children into foster care, makes families vulnerable to housing insecurity, maintains or leads to over-policed communities, increases risk of incarceration to children of incarcerated parents, etc., our panelists also helped us understand how to advocate for policies and practices that restore Black families and Black communities.
We were thrilled to have Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad as our moderator of this conversation. Our panelists included Chelsea Higgs Wise, Executive Director of Marijuana Justice, Dominque Jones-Johnson, Founder of Daughters Beyond Incarceration and Parenting from Prison, Josie Pickens, Program Director at the upEND Movement, and Region LaCour, Mentee at Daughters Beyond Incarceration.