Get on the Bus For Prison Visits

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-02-19 11:48:00 UTC
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Ciara Main, a senior at California's St. Joseph High School, doesn't remember much about going to visit her father in prison as a child. "I just remember taking long trips," Ciara says. "I was very young at the time."

However fuzzy, the memory is ingrained enough that today, she's working to ensure that hundreds of other California children aren't denied that same experience.

It's an overwhelming figure: Nationally, one in eight kids in the United States will lose one or both of their parents to incarceration during some period of their lifetime. In a trend that's prompted some to call such children the "silent victims" of the system, often, children are deprived of their parents and shuttled in and out of foster care for years.

Accordingly, thousands of children make regular pilgrimages on buses and trains to federal and state prisons just to see their parents -- journeys in some cases of hundreds of miles and burdensome costs.

This week, as president of her school's "Get on the Bus" Club, Ciara sold bowls of rice on her campus in an effort to raise both money for and awareness about kids making similar trips. In partnership with another local school, she plans to help her high school raise about $7,000 to hire a bus that can ferry kids across the state for a family visit.

Four years ago, the "Get on the Bus" initiative was able to support just four buses. This year, though, the program has ballooned to 15 of them. The trip is planned for around Father's Day, when kids will travel to the California Mens Colony -- a six-hour journey -- to see their dads. Get on the Bus's rides are free for kids and their caregivers who want to join, and covers care packages and other tokens, including the gift of a teddy bear to the imprisoned parent, who in turn can mail it to his or her kid.

It's an inspiring initiative, and one that I'd definitely recommend you check out here. And while youth like Ciara may be leading the way, those visits can be as much of an anchor for a parent as for a child. Ciara, for one, says she knows those visits definitely helped her dad. "I was the reason he straightened out his life," she says.

Photo Credit: billaday

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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