I have been interning at LSRJ for over a month now, and it has been a great learning experience, even though much of what I have learned makes me simultaneously sick to my stomach and incredulous that such egregious violations of human rights can still go on in this day and age. I attended LSRJ’s first Summer Networking Lunch last week at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), a legal services and advocacy organization that, as the name implies, works with incarcerated parents, with an emphasis on prisoners from Communities of Color and low-income communities. Most of us are aware that in the U.S., incarceration disproportionately impacts People of Color, the poor, and other marginalized populations. However, it was not until this Networking Lunch that I began to more fully realize that the harms done by incarceration unjustly impacts, not just the individuals who are imprisoned – many of whom are sentenced for non-violent drug offenses – but also their families and communities. Those sentenced to prison are taken well outside of their communities – presumably to take them away from the “influences” that made them turn to crime in the first place – where they are separated from their loved ones and are unable to maintain ties to their community that, if preserved, would perhaps make reintegration into society much more successful. This is especially hard for prisoners with children; even though a great many of those incarcerated are imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses, incarcerated parents are regularly disallowed from even basic physical contact with their children for more than a year. They also have very little time to even see their children, as those looking after their kids must take time off of work and expend resources they probably don’t have to bring the children to the prison, where there is no real place for kids to be comfortably. Families, and therefore the community at large, are further ripped apart if family members of prisoners (often grandparents of those incarcerated) who are perfectly able and willing to take care of these kids are disallowed from doing so because of laws that restrict the placement of children with ex-felons – even if the felonies were for crimes completely unrelated to children and were non-violent and occurred many years ago. Though it might seem reasonable at first to disallow placement of children with felons, in many cases, it seems that placing children with family members who love them and their incarcerated parents, who will work to keep the family together and who are invested in the success of these kids, is much better than taking children completely out of their community and placing them in homes at great distance from all of their social ties, and often into communities that in no way resemble the ones from which they came. In this way, many communities not only lose members due to incarceration, but also lose a lot of bright kids due to the repercussions of the incarceration of their parents – and this loss of human capital is often permanent.