This story breaks your heart. Summer’s World by Summer McKenzie is the author’s own story. Her mom died when she was two and her father was sent to prison a few years later. The book explores her feelings of sadness from losing both parents.
Through counseling, family support, and regular visits to see her father things have found their rhythm. Sort of. But the “go-for-it” illustrations and face-value narrative aren’t the focus of this critique.
Why? This is the type of book you buy at a fundraiser, to support the cause.
Here’s why you should pick up a copy: Summer’s trajectory into her teens may not follow the 60,000 other juveniles incarcerated in correctional facilities or out-of-home placement, A.K.A. foster care. However, her story could have easily turned out that way.
Youth of color are disproportionately likely to suffer the harms of these failed policies and practices. Of course, Summer is experiencing this from a relevant vantage. Her suffering is shared by over one million other children with incarcerated parents. Many of whom may get caught in the cycle.
Despite research showing that incarceration leads to high juvenile recidivism rates, as well as poor education, employment, and health outcomes for youth, systems often fail to use alternatives to incarceration. Moreover, nearly 250,000 youth are tried in the adult criminal justice system annually, and nearly 10,000 are housed in adult jails or prisons on any given night.
Summer’s book is an attempt by her family to pull together during this crisis. The art came from a prisoner her father met, Carlos Knox. The narrative is a hybrid of Sharon McKenzie and Summer’s work, meshed into a children’s book that captures a disturbing trend in society. More telling, the book itself was published by a company that caters to incarcerated writers.
Since 1999, Midnight Express Books has helped over 250 other incarcerated writers publish their books. Prisoners and their families pay a premium and get what they get. The benefit? Through these back-channels the battered and raw reality of incarceration, for a large segment of poor citizens, has a chance to reach the public.
“Censorship by poverty” victimizes these folks with its own vicious cycle, but that’s a topic for another discussion.
It was worth it for Summer’s World. Filled with chilling touches, like visiting Summer’s “favorite mall” after a prison visit, or “praying” each night for her father’s safe return. It offers insight into what it’s really like to say goodbye to a loved one doing time. This book exposes issues such as the lack of healthy counseling alternatives for children dealing with these circumstances.
No wonder so many “act-out.”
The system’s approach to these problems are riddled with clinical detachment, sweet-talk, humiliation, and a lack of guts. Most “help” feels like what it is: exploitation. The problem will only get worse until “real” solutions are implemented.
That means stakeholders have to get involved.
Summer’s World is a cry for such action. The surface is peeled back, never relenting in this short book. If done a little better, with some nuance, some flare, it might make a riveting memoir someday. Despite its errors and omissions, it does something few books can do: intrude its way into your mind for days.
My thoughts were “what I am doing to help?”
I recently participated in a “family re-integration” event in the Bureau Of Prisons in Forrest City, Arkansas. About six families, out of 1,500 inmates housed, attended. Between the cheap carnival games and popcorn, I sat drawing caricatures and trying not to disrupt their three hour free-time. Some adults spoke only to each other, re-hashing issues and ignoring their children. Some crammed as much attention on their kids as possible.
Six out of 1,500 inmates. It’s been the same number for the last five events. The scheduling and costs of travel are prohibitive to most families. Call it the bureaucratic nature of prisons: many well-meaning programs are plainly ineffective. The problems are too big. They make the head spin. The only fix is to look down, consider what can be done in the space you occupy and get to work.
What strikes me most is watching the kids loosen up and embrace the confines of the locked visitation room.
Their friends have a comparably normal home-life; at least one parent isn’t in prison. And many suffer in isolation. Numerous children with a parent in prison have said as much, citing humiliation and withdrawal. You don’t have to pour over many scientific studies to see the roots of a real human dilemma.
You can’t look away from it when flipping through Summer’s World. Solutions are far-removed from those comfortable policy, fix-all discussions.
Some are tired of talking about it and have taken action.
‘Malachi Dad’ is a faith-based Christian inmate self-help program that teaches inmates ways to interact and mend relations, plus how to be better fathers. The program originated in Louisiana State Penitentiary, more commonly known as Angola Prison. “These men are helping each others’ families, turning towards each other,” said a program facilitator. That might sound like a pearl, but it is swallowed in the concentric circles of an insatiable social indifference.
Unfortunately the blue Muppet on Sesame Street’s online adversity-teaching kit – “Little Children , Big Challenges” – can’t reverse that kind of force.
Dynamic initiatives like POPS (Pain Of the Prison System), which started in California as an after-school group, and organizations like the Un-Prison Project, founded by Deborah Jaing Stein, who experienced childhood in foster care (her mother was incarcerated) have made local impacts. The problem with national impacts is philanthropic shortages. Without greater support these grassroots movements are heartwarming, and inadequate. Where the cycle of sons and daughters who might follow their parents’ footsteps into prison seems to appeal less than donating to a PTA event of delivering canned goods to a homeless shelter, we see history repeating itself.
Joseph Stalin said “A single death is a tragedy: a million deaths is a statistic.”
So let us turn to the issue at hand. Summer’s World presents an opportunity to do something for one little girl. Visit Amazon.com today. Buy a copy of Summer’s World and leave a message. That could evolve into something much stronger later on.
Consider it an investment.
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Summer’s World by Summer McKenzie is available on Amazon and Createspace in Paperback for 9.95
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