There are a staggering number of people behind bars in this country — one of the largest incarcerated populations in the world — so it should be no surprise that the number of children with incarcerated parents is enormous, too.
In fact, 2.7 million children in the U.S. have a parent in prison, according to Children of Promise, NYC. Sharon Content, who founded and heads that organization, points out that despite their large number, the children of incarcerated parents are largely overlooked.
“When a child loses a parent as a result of divorce, military deployment or death, society says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,’” Content said. “But when a child loses a parent as a result of incarceration, that same level of empathy doesn’t exist. It’s hard for these kids and all of those emotions often manifest in negative behaviors, because there’s no outlet, there’s no safe space.”
Children of Promise, NYC (CPNYC) has created that safe space. It is one of number of groups dealing with incarceration and the justice system that received funding from MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving as part of its first open call for applications. In fact, the criminal legal system and its widespread human fallout was a recurring theme in Yield Giving’s latest avalanche of giving (see IP’s previous coverage of some of the environmental groups and Latino-serving organizations that were among Scott’s grantees, as well as the big-picture takeaways).
While many of the organizations that received funds from Yield Giving work at the intersection of multiple issues, 67 gifts went to recipients that tagged “incarceration and justice system involvement” as a focus area in the latest round of giving, totaling $117 million at an average grant of around $1.7 million. That’s about 19% of the total number of gifts in the open call.
Since Scott started her norm-shattering giving project, 215 gifts have gone to groups that identified this category as a focus area, or about 9% of the total, suggesting a bump in interest this round. As Children of Promise demonstrates, such grants fall squarely in the open call’s stated goal of “elevating organizations working with people and in places experiencing the greatest need in the United States.”
An array of organizations that received funding in this latest round offer legal services, provide diversion alternatives to keep young people out of the carceral system, help incarcerated people and those leaving prison, or support impacted families, in the case of Children of Promise, NYC.
Afterschool, summer camp, and prison visits
Sharon Content, who formerly worked in finance on Wall Street, started Children of Promise, NYC 15 years ago. She took the Wall Street job right out of college and says she liked the work, but didn’t find it satisfying. “I enjoyed the energy, the sexiness of working on Wall Street. But I didn’t have any passion or real connection to the work itself,” she said.
Content left Wall Street to work at a nonprofit for teens, and later was hired as COO at the Boys and Girls Club in the South Bronx. In that role, she often encountered children with incarcerated parents. “A child’s grandmother would kind of lean in and say, ‘You know, his mom’s in prison, that’s why he’s acting out,’” she said. “Or ‘his dad just got arrested.’ Or ‘she hasn’t seen her father in two years.’ They would have these negative behaviors because no one was addressing the challenges of the situation the young person was dealing with.”
Content was frustrated because there was no organization to which she could refer those families for help, so she decided to start one herself. CPNYC provides after school programs, summer day camps and mental health services to children with incarcerated parents and their families.
“What makes our model unique and innovative is not only that we provide a safe, fun space, but we’re also a mental health wellness center,” Content said. “So we are staffed with clinicians, nurse practitioners, psychiatrists; our scholars are able to come in and meet with an onsite mental health clinician who they can talk to about what they’re going through.”
CPNYC also encourages contact between children and their incarcerated parent, which research has shown to be positive for child and parent alike. “We connect our scholars with their parents in as many ways as we can,” Content said. “That’s writing letters, sending report cards, sending pictures, drawings — any way that we can connect. I probably have over 500 letters from incarcerated parents thanking me for not only supporting their child, but also just respecting their relationship.” Before COVID, CPNYC provided families with free transportation for prison visits; Content hopes to resume that program soon.
CPNYC serves 350 children aged six to 18 every year. Sharon Content intends to use the $2 million from MacKenzie Scott to increase that number — and her organization’s reach. Her goal is to expand nationwide; she plans to begin with pilots in the five states with the highest rates of incarceration: California, Texas, Florida, Ohio and Georgia.
Children of Promise, NYC represents a common theme in Yield Giving’s approach to funding, which has from the start emphasized the welfare of children and families, education equity, access to healthcare, and economic opportunity — often through an intersectional lens.
Prevention, legal support, and reentry
Other incarceration-related groups that received funding in Scott’s Open Call fall into several categories. Some provide legal support, like the North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services and the ACLU of Alabama, which plans to use its Yield Giving funds to support criminal legal reform as well as voting rights and gender justice.
Preventing young people from entering the carceral system in the first place is the mission of a number of grantees, including Washington, D.C.-based Access Youth which aims “to keep more of D.C.’s at-risk youth in school and out of the justice system, so they can reach their full potential.”
Organizations that provide support for people leaving prison were also grantees. Minneapolis-based All Square, for example, has a restaurant that provides training and employment for formerly incarcerated individuals; its Prison to Law Pipeline partners with paralegal schools, law schools, law firms and community organizations to provide legal education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. PACE, in Indianapolis, includes a range of services, including recovery, employment and support for basic needs for those leaving prison and their families. Their tagline: “Felonies Don’t Define Futures.”
The Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas provides re-entry and entrepreneurship services for men who have been incarcerated, with the goal of increasing opportunity and reducing recidivism. And Oakland-based GRIP Institute pioneered a program that uses restorative justice principles to help inmates understand the roots of their behavior and develop emotional intelligence skills. The results are impressive: 1,233 GRIP students have graduated, 421 have been released, and only two students have returned to prison.
Crime and punishment
Those involved with the criminal legal system and their families aren’t a popular cause these days. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the racial reckoning that followed, there were widespread calls for criminal justice reform throughout the country. Since then, however, there has been a powerful backlash. Today, conservative outlets and political candidates are fanning fears about crime, and lawmakers are once again pushing harsh criminal penalties. Polls show that Americans are convinced violent crime is rampant, even though crime rates have fallen sharply since a spike in 2020, as NPR reported recently.
Ruport Murdoch’s New York Post, which often features lurid crime reports, recently slammed MacKenzie Scott for the causes she supported in her open call, pointing out that she provided “$117 million to 67 prisoner-advocacy groups and other organizations helping jailbirds and ex-cons.” (The headline trumpeted Scott’s “donations to extreme left groups boosting migrant criminals, trans athletes.”)
In fact, Scott deserves credit for understanding a reality that, as a society, we still haven’t learned: myopic “tough on crime” measures and mass incarceration don’t reduce crime and are wildly expensive — as well as just plain cruel. Meanwhile, incarceration creates cascading societal pains, leaving groups like CPNYC and the dozens of nonprofits that recently received funding from Scott to repair the damage. Investing in programs that work to prevent crime, reintegrate formerly incarcerated individuals who have served their time, and provide resources for those impacted by the criminal legal system are not only a more humane approach, but a far more effective one.
