When a parent goes to prison, their children are serving the time with them.
Today my mentee, T.J., told me that in April his father is "finally coming home." After 10 years, his father will be released from prison. T.J. said that this will be the first year that he will be able to remember spending a birthday with his dad.
10 years. 10. Years. 10 years of driving hundreds of miles once every two months just to see the face of his father. 10 years of being told that he is only allowed to embrace his father twice per visit. 10 years of telling his friends and teachers that his father was deployed, or in college, or "away."
10 years of little league games and basketball games and football games without his father cheering from the sideline. 10 years of phone calls cut short due to insufficient funds. 10 years of memories that T.J. could have been building with his father, if it weren't for the bars built between them.
So when I say that children are "doing time" with their incarcerated parents, what I'm really saying is that prison doesn't just exist as a jail cell.