Photo via @EastSideLemonFB/Twitter
December 3, 2021, 11:12 am
A viral video on Twitter showing the powerful reaction a young girl had to being surprised by her dad who had been in prison since she was a baby is wrenching hearts and prompting calls to end a cruel prison system that separates families — disproportionately, Black families. As the girl comes out of the school building, she lays eyes on her father, and at the moment of recognition her jaw drops, she lets all her stuff fall to the floor, and starts screaming as she leaps into his arms where she cries for the next 30 seconds of the video, and probably much longer.
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Just try not to cry yourself watching this.
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Bro been gone since before my niece was 1 and he surprised her by picking her up from school on his first day out
pic.twitter.com/usUsXBN5w0
— Bob Lemon (@EastSideLemonFB) December 2, 2021
“Bro been gone since before my niece was 1 and he surprised her by picking her up from school on his first day out,” wrote uncle Bob Lemon.
Although clearly the girl is happy to see her dad, the heart-breaking crying seems like it could only come from grief as she had been separated from him since she was a single year old, only able to see him in very restrictive prison visits. Clearly the girl’s mother made sure these visits would happen, or else she has an incredible memory, but the anguish in the child’s sobs has people once again disgusted by what we do to families by locking people away en masse.
The U.S. currently holds a whopping 25 percent of the total global prison population inside of its many (often for-profit) prison walls in spite of the country holding just five percent of the total global population overall within its borders. That prison population is very disproportionately man up of BIPOC. According to the ACLU, one out of every three Black men in the U.S. can expect to enter the prison system in his lifetime compared to just one in 17 when it comes to white men.
To make matters worse, with our cash bail system, the strong majority of people currently incarcerated have not been found guilty of a crime and are, according to our Constitution, presumed innocent. In spite of supposed right to a speedy trial for these folks, they often spend years just waiting to have their day in court. This and the threat of life sentences often results in innocent people taking deals to plead guilty even when they’re definitely not guilty.
Meanwhile, for-profit prisons often make deals with state governments saying that the state has to pay them for any empty beds in their prisons, incentivizing those governments to ensure that their police arrest and incarcerate as many people as possible.
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These and other facts about the horrors of U.S. incarceration were brought up by many people commenting on and quote tweeting the original post, especially BIPOC who are intimately familiar with the system.
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The harm felt from imprisonment extends far beyond the individual. Her wails and anguished sobs hit me right in the gut, the pain
We are harming mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews.. so many w/ our mass incarceration machine. https://t.co/y2htWVNHOi
— Public Defendering, Esq. (@fodderyfodder) December 3, 2021
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*First Published: December 3, 2021, 11:12 am
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