Please, Miss America, don't stop with the children

Laura Kaeppeler is the new Miss America. I am not interested in pageants so her celebrity escapes me. However, what caught my eye was the cause she is going to promote during her tenure. From the Washington Post:

But the glamorous appearances go for a most unglamorous cause. As someone who saw her father hauled off to prison for a white collar crime, Kaeppeler uses her high-profile platform to shine a spotlight on the 2.7 million, largely unseen kids who have an incarcerated parent.

She is thinking small. She is going to focus on restoring funding for the Mentoring Children of Prisoners federal program. She is thinking very small.

The problem we face in this country associated with our penal system is not just children of the prisoners. The big picture problem is we have a larger percentage of our population behind bars or under state supervision than any other nation, developed or not.

There are only two explanations why we have so many Americans living in cages. One is that we are an inherently evil bunch, prone to ignore laws to get what they want. That is an amusing image but probably not true. The second is that we are a vindictive society. Any violation of rules needs to be punished harshly. Disobedience will not be tolerated. Dissidence will not be tolerated. Color within the lines or we will kick the snot out of you. Merciful is not an adjective you can use to describe America in the 21st century. Adam Gopnik described our penal mania this way on the pages of the New Yorker:

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

So, Miss America, don't stop with restoring existing funding for the mentoring program. Let's face facts, $49 million over an 8 year period is the drop in the bucket when you are talking about 2 million children of prisoners. That works out to be about $20 per child per year. Woo hoo.

For Laura Kaeppler, this fight is personal since her own father was arrested and imprisoned when she was younger. She knows that the real needs of children with incarcerated parents go beyond a mentoring program. However, she probably sees restoring funding for the federal mentoring program is a reasonable goal for the next year. And she is right. That is a large, but manageable focus while on the road for the better part of the coming year.

Miss America, I plead with you to add one more thing to your list. Please. Pretty Please. Talk about our need as a country to become at least as merciful as the the rest of the world. Lend your voice to calls for us to become less vindictive and more merciful. Because of your celebrity, people will listen to you.

Think about, Miss America. After all, if there were fewer Americans behind bars, there would be fewer children at risk because of the incarceration of a parent.