They Asked Our No More Victims Founder, Marilyn Gambrell
More than 90,000 children in the Houston area will have a parent wind up in the county jail this year, according to a new study. That doesn’t even include the thousands of local parents sent to state prison or jails in other Texas counties.
Our No More Victims program has been working with the children of incarcerated parents for 25 years. We wanted to share an interview with No More Victims founder, Marilyn Gambrell, concerning the study on the price children pay when a parent goes to jail.
The report by Children’s Hospital, Baylor Medical and the Harris County Sheriff’s office shows that nearly half of the inmates in the Harris County Jail in Houston have at least one child when they are arrested. In most cases, the incarcerated parent provided most of the support for his or her children, raising the real threat of poverty, food insecurity and homelessness in the aftermath of an arrest. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez has said he plans to revamp the way the jail system interacts with children of inmates.
COCI/No More Victims served on the advisory committee that reviewed the study. We work with teens in some of Houston’s toughest high schools.
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