One in every 14 children in the U.S. has had a parent in prison. For poor families, it’s one in eight. They are the collateral damage of a mass incarceration movement that has made the U.S. the nation with the most prisoners in the world.
For the past nine years, it’s been the job of Aileen Keays Yeager to figure out what that means for children in Connecticut.
She is project manager for the Children with Incarcerated Parents Initiative at the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at Central Connecticut State University. Since its inception in 2008, she had administered funding for non-profits that serve these children, then studied to see what works.