WAR ON THE FAMILY: Mothers in Prison and the Children They Leave Behind
The drastic and destructive impact of incarcerating women is revealed in painstaking detail in WAR ON THE FAMILY: Mothers in Prison and the Children They Leave Behind.
Haunting first person narratives, coupled with analysis from passionate advocates, paint a devastatingly clear picture of the effects imprisonment has not only on the women who are locked away, but also on the children who have been left behind.
Aired in 3 segments in Chicago on ABC's Sanctuary program.
DVD. Color, 48 minutes. English, Spanish and French subtitles.
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This DVD copy of War on the Family includes an institutional license, which entitles your organization or institution to library lending rights and the rights to screen the film for both paying and non-paying audiences. Duplication of the film is prohibited.
A paper copy of this license will be included in the mailing of the film.
FORMERLY INCARCERATED WOMEN FROM THE FILM
Wenona Thompson
"Before long, I realized that I became part of a cycle, a system, that looked forward to seeing me there. And I was aware that, because of some of my circumstances, that I would be one of those people who fill up their prisons."
Margaret Martinez
"I would run away all the time and just stay out because I was afraid to be in the house. Either my mother was beating me or he was sexually molesting me so it was like, I didn’t know what to do. I just knew that I felt safer outside in the streets."
Misty McQueen
"Me and my brothers was back in, we was just everywhere. We was everywhere. We was split up sometimes and we came back together and was split up again. Periodically, whenever my Mom would surface, she’d get us together again, get us a place. It might last all of about 3, 4 months then we’d be back fending for ourselves.."
RESOURCES
CLAIM
Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers
www.claim-il.org
FAMM
Families Against Mandatory Minimums
www.famm.org
The Illinois Department of Corrections
www.idoc.state.il.us
The Justice Policy Institute
www.justicepolicy.org
St. Leonard's Ministries / Grace House
www.slministries.org
The American Civil Liberties Union
www.aclu.org
Human Rights Watch
www.hrw.org
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STATISTICS
African-American children are 9 times as likely as white children to have a parent in prison; Latino children are 3 times as likely.
Five percent of women entering prison are pregnant; another 15% have babies less than 6 weeks old.
Twenty-three states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons allow for the shackling of incarcerated women while they are in labor.
Eighty percent of incarcerated women in the US are mothers. Sixty percent of the children of these mothers are under 10 years old.
Over 60% of women entering prison in the United States have not attained a high school diploma.
1.3 million children under 18 in the US now have a mother in some phase of the criminal justice system.
More than 10 million children in the US have had a parent imprisoned at some point in their lives.
Illinois incarcerates African-American women at a rate 5 1/2 times higher than white women for drug possession, though rates of drug usage are similar for both groups.
Illinois' rate of re-uniting an incarcerated mother and her children after prison is only 28%.
In Illinois, 73% of the women's prison population are women of color.
While over 80% of women in the Illinois Department of Corrections need drug treatment, it is available to only 16% of them.