Ignited by the movement to reform the criminal justice system, Ebony Underwood, a daughter of an incarcerated parent who experienced firsthand the devastation of decades of separation from her father, was determined to center the voices of children and young adults with incarcerated parents.

In 2018,  WE GOT US NOW was officially launched.

Built by, led by and about children and young adults with incarcerated parents, WE GOT US NOW was established to recognize ALL children and young adults who’ve experienced having a parent(s) in local jails, state prisons and federal correctional facilities. We work tirelessly to create awareness about this sub-population of vulnerable children across systems by focusing on our four guiding principles, to engage, educate, elevate, and empower. We apply these guiding principles in every aspect of our programming that includes public education, narrative change, technical advisement, civic engagement, leadership development, peer mentorship, well-being and policy reform. 

In our work to reform the criminal justice system, we've helped to move the needle by centering, identifying, organizing and mobilizing our once historically invisible population, building strategic partnerships with allies, and advocating for policies and practices that have been committed to keeping our families connected, creating fair sentencing, and ending mass incarceration. 

Over the past five years, we’ve successfully built from the ground up a nationwide network of directly impacted leaders with a new, innovative approach to addressing the needs and well-being of children and young adults with incarcerated parents that has developed into a vetted, proven program that has impact, value and meaning. 

Across our public policy research for this impact report, we analyzed over 50 years of legislation that fueled the decades-long separation of families via mass incarceration. With the increase in draconian, mandatory minimum sentencing policies, the prison population increased 500% over the last 40 years. It is clear how destructive narratives perpetuated alongside the institution of these inhumane, draconian policies spun out into a full-on racialized war against Black and Brown communities with devastating rippling effects on their families and children, who were deemed less relevant. In 1987, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines determined that family ties and responsibilities were not relevant in sentencing a parent outside the guidelines. This subtle proclamation gave little to no consideration for children with incarcerated parents, ultimately erasing our needs, our pain, and our humanity. It wasn’t until 20 years later that we saw an overt mention of children with incarcerated parents in the Second Chance Act of 2007, as policymakers passed legislation that funded reentry research to support relationships between incarcerated parents and their children. It is imperative to recognize that it took 37 years - from the first mention of the War on Drugs in 1970 to the millions of people incarcerated in 2007 - for those in power to recognize the harm that mass incarceration placed on our families.  To this day in 2023, children with incarcerated parents remain in close proximity to the collateral consequences of mass incarceration.

Isolation has become a Public Health Crisis

Fifty years ago, a set of policies were instituted under the guise of the War on Drugs that surged the rate of incarceration in America and led to mass incarceration. These policies created detrimental consequences that resulted in the United States ranking highest in the world for incarcerating people, with over 5 million people under legal supervision, and nearly 2 million in jail or prison. Incarcerated parents make up 50% of the prison population. There are currently almost 5 million children under the age of 18 in the United States currently living with a parent behind bars. The epidemic of children that have been impacted by parental incarceration is sizable. 10 million children – a number that equates to 3% of the United States population – at some point in their lives have experienced parental incarceration. This vulnerable population of children has been subjected to dehumanizing experiences in an effort to merely remain connected to their incarcerated parents.

There are currently almost 5 million children in the United States who currently have a parent incarcerated, and 10 million who have experienced parental incarceration at some point during their lives. 

Transactional Love

With the surge of mass incarceration, millions of children began to feel the severe impacts of the inhumane separation from their justice-impacted parents. In 2000, more than half of incarcerated parents reported never receiving a personal visit from their children.  Today, in 2023, the love and connection for children and their incarcerated parents is continuously monetized, devalued and diminished to a transactional relationship through exploitative, predatory communications systems via costly phone calls that charge exorbitant fees, online communications systems that further the elimination of in-person visits, and the cost of transportation to correctional facilities hundreds of miles from where children and families reside making distance an expensive barrier to keeping families connected.

The collateral consequences of mass incarceration have created devastating emotional harm to millions of innocent children. This harm is a combination of trauma, stigma and shame

Trauma  The unnatural, unspoken and often abrupt experience of separation by incarceration, between a child and their parent, can be emotionally and physically devastating. The unhealed and often misdiagnosed trauma from this experience has left children to silently suffer and cope with the impacts of separation by incarceration alone and often compartmentalize the experience as a means of survival, despite these devastating circumstances.

Stigma Dehumanizing narratives about people when they are arrested and incarcerated can cause a tremendous amount of stigma for a child with an incarcerated parent. Perpetuated narratives across news and media outlets that suggest incarcerated individuals are inherently evil people, who should forever remain a public safety risk, unworthy of redemption, love or reunification with their families is reaffirmed with extremely harsh sentencing policies, such as life sentences without the possibility of parole. These narratives, coupled with race, as a defining characteristic of incarcerated individuals, create disproportionate racial and ethnic disparities that have become significant amongst Black, Brown, and Native American communities in the United States. This has led to a generation of millions of children and young adults with incarcerated parents who are often too afraid to speak out and share about the injustices they face due to the debilitating stigma that's associated with having an incarcerated parent.  

Shame The shame for children and young adults with incarcerated parents emanates from ongoing false narratives that suggest our relationship to our parents makes us genetically inclined to be at-risk, bad actors destined for imprisonment.

Isolation has become a public health crisis which is something children with incarcerated parents have dealt with both physically and emotionally.

Erasing the Stain of Mass Incarceration 

Childhood into Adulthood 

The stain of mass incarceration is that there is no magic button at the age of 18 that will erase all of the trauma, stigma and shame from this experience. If anything, our experience only crosses a new developmental time period as we now move from adolescents with incarcerated parents to young adults with incarcerated parents. Young adults continue to cope with the harms caused by the collateral consequences of mass incarceration. WE GOT US NOW has implemented programming that is strengths-based and supports the health and overall well-being of children and young adults impacted by parental incarceration.

Not A Monolithic Issue

The experiences of children with incarcerated parents are not a monolith. Having a parent in jail is very different from having a parent in a state prison, and having a parent in jail or state prison is extremely different from having a parent in a federal correctional facility. The correlation between all 3 of these experiences is that the pain is the same. Children, more often than not, want to remain connected to their incarcerated parents. Oftentimes due to proximity, cost of travel, and/ or lack of adequate transportation, children are unable to maintain a solid connection with their incarcerated parents. WE GOT US NOW works to ensure that local, state and federal policymakers are informed about the importance of keeping our families connected.

Debunking Harmful Narratives  

Combat Deficit-Based Language

WE GOT US NOW aims to combat deficit-based language and narratives, by promoting and uplifting a thriving constituency of children and young adults impacted by parental incarceration. Deficit-based language and harmful narratives emanate from narrow studies that collect data from small samples and create a perpetual stain from mass incarceration that stalks the lives of children and young adults impacted by parental incarceration, causing a large part of our population to hide in the shadows.

Examples of harmful narratives WE GOT US NOW works to debunk and shift from public discourse about children with incarcerated parents are: 

Children with incarcerated parents…

• will be more physically aggressive as children.
• are more likely to be at risk for high school dropouts.
• will have an increased likelihood of mental health problems and behavior problems.
• are more likely to have significantly lower earnings in adulthood, greater mental health problems, and a decreased probability of going to college  

MYTH: Children with incarcerated parents are more likely to become incarcerated.

The most harmful narrative about children with incarcerated parents is the research that falsely states, “Children with incarcerated parents are more likely to become incarcerated.”  This is a myth that has been blanketed to represent all children and young adults with incarcerated parents. According to Annie E. Casey Foundation, “the notion that children whose parents are imprisoned are several times more likely than other children to be incarcerated when they become adults is widely accepted as fact in scholarly, political, and bureaucratic circles. There is no solid evidence, however, to support this assertion.”