“Are you proud of your mother?” Colie Lavar Long, known as Shaka, asked 13-year-old Jade Muñez when he found her waiting at the Georgetown University Law Center. She had come straight from school and was waiting for her mother, Jessica Trejo—who, like Long, is formerly incarcerated—to finish her classes before they would head home together, part of their daily routine.
Muñez said yes, a heartwarming moment for both Long and Trejo, who are friends through their involvement in Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative. Trejo recalled that day: “When I came out, [Long] told me, ‘I think it’s awesome that your daughter comes here after school. Any other kid would be like, I'm out of here.’” This mother-daughter bond inspired Long to encourage this kind of family relationship through an initiative he named the Family First program.
Long founded the program through Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative (PJI), where he serves as a program associate. Long was incarcerated when he was 18 years old and sentenced to life without parole. He served 26 years in various federal prisons before he regained his freedom in 2022 through DC’s Second Look Amendment Act, which expanded on previous legislation and allowed incarcerated individuals who were under 25 years old at the time of their crime and had served at least 15 years to request a reduced sentence. He started taking Georgetown classes through PJI’s Prison Scholars program when in the DC Jail, earned his Georgetown degree, and began working with PJI just days after his release.
PJI hosts many successful prison education and reentry programs to assist currently and formerly incarcerated individuals, but Long noticed a key gap in their work. “All our programs are a response-based method to this problem called mass incarceration,” he said. “How come we can’t incorporate a more preventative method program? You know, targeting the youth and the children of justice-impacted families and working on [breaking] the cycle of intergenerational incarceration?”
Nearly half of incarcerated individuals held in state prisons have children under the age of 18, and about 1.25 million children have an incarcerated parent. Many of these children’s lives are uprooted as they are forced to move in with other family members. They often face health and cognitive challenges during their development, as well as stigma that can lead to isolation and make it difficult for them to enjoy a “normal” childhood. Prisons and jails also make it difficult for parents and children to maintain contact. Two-thirds of incarcerated parents never receive visits from their children, mainly due to strict visitation policies and being located far—often hundreds of miles—from home.
“Men and women coming back to society have a certain apprehension as far as reintegrating themselves back into their child’s lives. They already feel a sense of shame, a sense of abandonment,” Long said. “So when we create experiences where the child and the parent can laugh together…you see how the family structure starts to reintegrate itself. And that end itself helps me combat the system of having children repeat the patterns that they saw from their parents.”
The Family First Program aims to strengthen family bonds through programming and outings for system-impacted parents and their children to experience together. Long began gaining interest by reaching out to families who were alumni of other PJI initiatives, including Trejo.
A Los Angeles native, Trejo was incarcerated for five years in federal prison before she moved to DC in 2021 in search of a fresh start. She graduated from the MORCA-Georgetown Paralegal Program in 2023 and now works at the DC Office of Human Rights. She also regained custody of Muñez after not having seen her for seven years, and soon after, her niece, Joellie. “I was learning to be a mother again all over,” she shared.
Trejo and Muñez have participated in the program since its first event, a two-hour financial literacy workshop for parents and children, which allowed them to learn and grow together. Other events since include trips to Legoland and Six Flags, kayaking on the Potomac River, and a holiday lunch. Up to 20 families usually participate, depending on the event, and children range from three years old to teenagers.
“The whole thing is how do we rebuild family bonds… by creating these experiences that were robbed due to the parents’ incarceration?” Long said. “As far as the actual outcome of the program, it’s beautiful.”
“It’s an amazing feeling,” Trejo said. “You know, to be able to create those memories through a program that's catered to returning citizens and their children.” She was thrilled that Nuñez loved the kayaking trip so much that she asked Trejo if they could do it again, just the two of them.
“I think Jessica and Jade really played a big part for me, just seeing that and witnessing that,” Long said. “Like, damn, this is something that’s needed.”
“I think that’s a critical missing aspect of crime prevention that people really don’t invest in,” he shared. “It’s easy to respond to something versus to actively prevent something from happening.”
One of the biggest challenges Long faces is organizing the events, given that all the participants—himself included—are still rebuilding their lives post-incarceration. Funding also always poses a challenge, and he hopes to have the means to fund more trips for more participants in the future.
What he is most hopeful for, however, is that Family First can serve as a model and inspire others to start similar initiatives. “I would appreciate that more than just somebody giving me money to continue running our program,” he said. “I’d love to see other people latch onto the idea and replicate it to a greater scale than I can do.”
“It gives a sense of pride for the child, you know, the child understands that yesterday, they may be able to remember time and their mom and dad wasn’t here, but it is also witnessing their mom and dad making strides to build a better life for the both of them.”
Alexis Tamm is a student at Georgetown University. An avid writer and aspiring journalist, she is passionate about solutions-focused reporting and driving change through storytelling.
Alexis was a cohort member in Common Ground USA's Journalism program, where Hugo Balta served as an instructor. Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. Learn more by clicking HERE.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.