The point is that we should try to ensure parents can spend more time with their kids

While public opinion seems to be shifting against separating parents from their children (low hanging fruit, to be sure), let’s also take a look at the 120,000 women and 1.1 million men who are incarcerated in U.S. prisons and also have children under 17.

I’m not making a blanket call to release anyone who is parent. Rather, we need to re-align our corrections systems to its original mission -- to improve our society as a whole. This means we should use common sense and modern technology to reduce or mitigate the negative effects on kids whose parents are in prison.

A logical place to start is with the moms.

Tyler Cowen wrote a column about this for Bloomberg. His suggestion:

Let’s take one-tenth of [women in prison for nonviolent offenses] and move them from prison to house arrest, combined with electronic monitoring. That would allow for proximity to their children. If the U.S. isn’t plagued by a subsequent wave of violent crime — and I don’t think it will be — let us try the same for yet another tenth. Let’s keep on doing this until it’s obviously not working. 

My hunch is that this would have a negligible effect on crime, reduce costs for taxpayers, reduce recidivism, and improve all sorts of outcomes for their kids.

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In my work as a teacher and administrator, I speak with parents regularly. This past year, I averaged 15 calls or texts per day. 

This included parents who are incarcerated. I've conferenced with parents and heard the monotone interruption of "This call is coming from a federal penitentiary." In other cases, I could infer that the parent was using a contraband cell phone. 

To state the obvious: parents care about their kids. They will go to extraordinary lengths to support them. It is in our interests as a society to help them do this. 

Our criminal justice system serves us, not the other way around.