Mother's Day

Note: The following essay originally appeared on The New York Times. See the original piece here.

Mother's Day is a celebration of motherhood and the influence that mothers have on society. But for too many American children -- including those I filmed for this project -- the holiday serves as a bitter reminder that their mothers are locked behind bars.

This film follows an overnight bus program that takes some of those children to visit their parents in California prisons during the weekends around Mother's Day (they coordinate similar trips for Father's Day). Journeys can be as long as ten hours one-way -- at the end of which children get to spend a few precious hours with their mothers.

Organized by the non-profit Center for Restorative Justice Works, these trips are one of the rare opportunities many of these children have to see their parents because remote, rural prisons can be difficult to access for low-income families.

While many are aware of the problems resulting from the United States' staggeringly high incarceration rate -- nearly one-fourth of the world's incarcerated population is in the United States -- it can be more difficult to consider the impact it has on the children who grow up without those parents.five million children in the United States have a parent who has been incarcerated. That breaks down to one in 14 children; for black children, it's one in 9. That's partly because we are incarcerating women at much higher rates than before. Women in jail are the fastest growing correctional population in the country; their numbers increased by 14 times between 1970 and 2014. Most of those women are poor, African-American or Latino, and have substance abuse problems. And about 80 percent have children.

While completing a fellowship with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, I decided to make a documentary about this experience by focusing on the long bus journeys that children have to endure simply to be with their mothers on Mother's Day. My co-director, R. J. Lozada, and I shot this project last year over many overnight bus rides to two California prisons, the Folsom Women's Facility in Folsom and the California Institution for Women in Corona.

We made Mother's Day to remind us of the steep price an entire generation of youth -- and by extension, our nation -- has to pay because of systems that remain broken across America. The incarceration epidemic is not just today's problem; it's a structural disaster that stretches across generations, and will be with us for many years to come.

— Elizabeth Lo, Co-Director