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In the final two days of fundraising, Echoes Of Incarceration is a long term project that helps children of incarcerated parents to make documentary films about the effects of America’s prison industrial complex — on society, on us, on families, on communities, and mostly on children without one or both parents behind bars.

There are an estimated 2.7 million children in America with one or both parents in prison or jail. Mass incarceration has created fundamental weaknesses in society. Mass incarceration as easily impacts individuals as it does vulnerable groups (the poor, the under-educated, the discriminated against) and often we perceive the effects as lasting only years, or being contained within the experience of one identified moment, lifetime or geographical space. We neglect to recognise that mass incarceration is piling pressures on top of problems on top of expectations on top of America’s young, developing citizens.

We live in a society in which vast numbers of youth must negotiate formative years without parental support. The prison industrial complex has burdened our youth with an almost inconceivable set of problems that they did not ask for, and they do not deserve.

Echoes Of Incarceration brings much needed scrutiny to the issue of mass incarceration and crucially it does it through the lens of the innocent people who have inherited a broken, brutalising system we made. Their latest productions deal specifically with the Bill of Rights of Children with Incarcerated Parents.

Please, fund this important project.

Below is a 2009 production made by Echoes Of Incarceration

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