I stood on a concrete path up ahead of four of my third graders. I was waiting for them to catch up to me so we could finish running through the park and back up the street to school. They were taking their time in the intense DC heat, walking along at a snail’s pace.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesdays I liked to help out Hendley’s librarian, Ms. Meyer, with the “Girls on the Run” after-school program when I had the time. Girls on the Run is a great organization that provides a social-emotional learning curriculum aimed at helping young girls be healthy, confident, and joyful. At our two practices per week, we “ran” through the local neighborhood with the handful of third and fourth graders enrolled in the program. I use quotation marks because the girls usually ended up walking and complaining almost the entire way, leaving us adults to jog in place while we waited and encouraged the girls to pick up their feet.

Of the four girls I was waiting for, three walked along side by side, with the other slightly ahead but turned around so she could still engage in the conversation. Sasha, the girl in the middle, looked like she was telling the other girls a story.

I yelled out to them to run and catch up to me. The girls didn’t even look up. They were too focused on their conversation. Even from a distance, I could see the serious look on each of their typically playful faces. The other three girls were giving Sasha their undivided attention – something even I rarely received.

​It wasn’t unusual for Sasha to be the center of attention. She was one of the most, if not the most, talkative students in the entire third grade, maybe the school. But she tended to focus on silly things like music or gently teasing one of her friends about something that happened at recess. Her ability to fill a silence and draw laughs made her well liked among her peers for the most part. Whenever a new student joined our class, Sasha was always the first to befriend them – I think she cleverly understood that a new friend also meant a new set of ears.

Her talking also got her into a fair amount of trouble throughout the year. Sasha was one of the worst readers in the class, struggling with the simplest low-level books designated for preschoolers. She would use chit chat as a way to avoid her difficult school work. We often rotated who she sat next to in hopes of limiting the chatter but Sasha always found something to discuss with whoever was “lucky” enough to get that seat. She was, for better or worse, a child truly bestowed with the gift of gab.

She also had another extremely distinguishable quirk. When Sasha wasn’t talking, she was sucking on her thumb. She sucked her thumb constantly, almost non-stop if she wasn’t talking, and especially hard when she got nervous. If we reprimanded her for behavior or asked her a question, you could count on her thumb to be used as a makeshift pacifier.  

Multiple teachers tried having conversations with her to stop the bad habit, but sadly we never successfully broke the cycle. It was clearly a soothing mechanism for the eight year old, and the physical embodiment of some intense anxiety in an otherwise cheerful child. It was during that Girls on the Run practice that I started to get a somewhat clearer picture of where that anxiety came from.

​As the girls approached me, I encouraged the four of them to pick up the pace and jog the rest of the way back to school. They paid me no attention, still too deep in conversation.

“So what happened?” one of the girls asked Sasha.

I began to quietly walk behind the girls. They needed adult supervision if they were going to trail this far behind the rest of the group.

“They came into my house and dragged my daddy down the stairs,” she said. “I was just a little girl so I started to cry. They yelled at me to be quiet. Then I started crying more.”

Nobody said a word. She continued.

“I was yelling to my daddy but I couldn’t do anything. They dragged him out of the house and hurt him. Then they put him in the car and took him to jail. I haven’t seen him since.”

Mass-incarceration affects entire families, and places poor children of color who lose a parent at an even further disadvantage than they already are. The United States has more than 2 million people in jail or prison, giving us the world’s highest incarceration rate by a substantial margin. African Americans, in particular, are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.

While these numbers are well known, it’s important to keep in mind that before these 2 million people were arrested, they did not live in isolation. Each incarceration must have some sort of ripple effect; each arrest and each absence must somehow alter the lives of those closest to the person being sent to prison.

Almost at the exact moment Sasha finished her story, we turned a corner and saw a police car parked a few yards ahead of us along the sidewalk. Sasha panicked. Her thumb quickly entered her mouth. She grabbed my hand, moved directly behind me, and tried to hide from the two male police officers getting out of their vehicle. The other girls followed suit and slowed their pace to also follow behind me. My abrupt transition from invisible chaperone to protective barrier was apparent to both me and the officers.

As they stepped onto the sidewalk, both men smiled and nodded to me and the girls. Their grins didn’t help. Realizing they could see her, Sasha tightened her grasp on my hand. The closer we got to the officers, the more Sasha physically tensed up, right until we were face to face with them. At that point Sasha froze in place, paralyzed by her fear. Eventually, I was able to slowly guide her past the two men.

Suddenly, Sasha broke into a dead sprint. Once again, the other girls followed her lead.

The only time they ran during practice that day was that half-block running away from the police.

They made it to the corner before they finally stopped to catch their breath.

“Those were the cops that hurt my daddy. It was them!”

In all likelihood, those were probably not the police officers that arrested Sasha’s father. Nevertheless, in that brief encounter, right as she was reliving a terrifying memory, I witnessed the effects of a little girl’s trauma – the trauma of a specific moment where she saw her father torn away from her, and the continued trauma of his absence from her life since.

Children with incarcerated fathers are at dramatically higher risks of facing health problems or becoming homeless. They are also much more likely to develop behavioral problems that impact their school performance, especially when the child lived with their father before the incarceration like Sasha did. One glimpse at Sasha’s teeth, you can see the health effects of her constant thumb-sucking. Spend one day in class with her, you see a child who struggles to keep quiet as much as she struggles to read a complete sentence.

We still had about a mile left to go to get back to school, but the girls didn’t run another step that day. Sasha didn’t say another word. She barely even made eye contact with anyone; she just stared straight ahead, drool dripping down her hand.

Between 1980 and 2012, the number of children in the United States with parents in prison or jail grew from 500,000 to an estimated 2.6 million.

2.6 million.

2.6 million children. Children just like Sasha, who are the forgotten victims of an unfair justice system and forced to go through all the trials of childhood without the care and support of at least one of their parents.

Children left with no way to cope with their pain but to stick their thumb in their mouth, and literally suck it up.

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