Google Helps Children of Incarcerated Dads Send Father's Day Message

Today about 2.7 million American children who have at least one parent in prison. This Father’s Day, Google partnered with several non-profit organizations for the project “#LoveLetters,” which helps some of these kids share messages they have written to their dads.

“When you come home, Dad, I want… ” 9-year-old Maya begins, but then stops and puts her face in her hands, too upset to continue. Maya’s father is serving a 25-year sentence in a California prison.

Maya, 9. (Image source: YouTube)

A video compilation of the messages includes statistics about children with incarcerated parents. For example, one fact listed is that “children with an incarcerated parent are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the trauma and stigma of being separated from a parent and lack of support systems.”

The campaign, created with non-profit organizations like Pops the Club, Place4Grace, Hour Children and In Arm’s Reach, helps the families affected by the absence of a parent stay connected with loved ones who are in jail while informing others of the unique struggles such families face.

The compilation video, created for Father’s Day 2016, states that “children who stay connected to their fathers are far less likely to continue the cycle of incarceration.”

“This work is part of our continued commitment to raising awareness about racial injustice, and to bearing witness to the human costs of mass incarceration,” Google stated on its official blog.

The search engine giant notes that mass incarceration has “disproportionately affected the lives of black men,” adding that from 1980 to 2007, about one in three of the 25.4 million adults arrested for drugs in the United States was African-American. If this trend continues, the blog states, one in three black boys born today will spend time in prison during his lifetime.

“All in all, we’re now at a point where there are more African-American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations of India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined,” the post continues.

Google noted in its Mother’s Day Love Letters post that African American children are 7.5 times more likely to have a parent behind bars than white children.

“This is what Love Letters conveys: the hurt of the children left behind—and the enduring bond between a child and a parent despite the barrier of prison walls,” the post states.

“We like disruption, and if there’s a system worth disrupting, it’s the criminal justice system,” David Drummond, vice president of corporate development for Alphabet, parent of Google, concludes.

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