Mother's Day

There are about 2.3 million people locked up in the United States (federal, state or local) right now. As a result, 7 percent of children – more than five million kids – have had at least one parent who has been incarcerated. That makes days like Mother’s Day especially poignant for them, if not awkward.

Today, I watched a short film, called “Mother’s Day,” part of The New York Times’s Op-Docs series and an official selection of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival. The movie “tells the story of an annual overnight bus service that takes children to visit their mothers in prison on weekends around Mother’s Day,” as the Times describes it. “These trips are one of the few opportunities many of these children have to see their parents because remote, rural prisons can be difficult to access for low-income families.”

Today, I also made a donation to the Center for Restorative Justice Works, which organizes the trips depicted in the film. It’s the least I could do on this Mother’s Day.