More than a hundred family members crowded into a visiting room at Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, California on a June afternoon, carrying the weight of travel time and security checkpoints. Then the incarcerated fathers walked through the door, and the room transformed.
Children sprinted to embrace their fathers. Some cried. Mothers waited their turn. The scene unfolded as part of an early Father's Day event organized by the Get on the Bus program, a transportation and support initiative run by the Center for Restorative Justice Works.
The program provides free bus rides and meals for families traveling to visit incarcerated loved ones, turning an otherwise expensive trip into an accessible occasion. For many families, the cost of prison visits is already punishing: vending machine sodas sell for three dollars, hot meals for ten. One family member reported spending over one hundred dollars on food alone during typical visits.
Alisa Romero brought her fourteen-year-old daughter and seven-year-old grandson to see her husband, Richard. She described the relief of not budgeting for inflated prison prices during the event. "The vending machines are expensive, but we don't have to pay for it, so it kind of makes it special that we're not so stressed about money coming back into the visit," she said.
Families across the country spend roughly three hundred fifty billion dollars yearly on incarceration-related costs, expenses that often keep them from visiting as frequently as they want. Free transportation and donated meals remove one barrier to maintaining crucial connections.
When Richard Romero entered the room, his children shed tears of emotion. The family played board games, used a photo booth, and caught up on milestones he had missed. For one family, the day held double significance: a teenager celebrated his high school graduation with his stepfather, Derrick Ware, through photos and conversation. Ware had received only thirty-second graduation videos while incarcerated. The in-person celebration changed that.
As visiting hours wound down, the fathers distributed teddy bears to their children. The stuffed animals served as physical anchors to the day, something tangible to hold after the goodbye. A woman sang Happy Birthday to her husband on his actual birthday for the first time in years.
Six hours evaporated. When the visit ended, families filed out one side of the room and incarcerated parents through the other. Children didn't understand why their fathers couldn't follow them. Some cried.
On the bus ride back to Los Angeles, children held the teddy bears for comfort, some using them as pillows against bus windows. It was all they had left of the day.
Liz Rios, executive director of the Center for Restorative Justice Works, framed the program's mission in simple terms: "Their parent is going to go home one day, and we want that bond to remain, so we're working to help the children with what occurred in the past, and those feelings of abandonment and shame, but also to help them in their own future and have a strong family unit."
For incarcerated parents, the visits offer mental and emotional reprieve from prison life and a reminder of what awaits outside the walls. For children, they provide rare face-to-face time with a parent they might otherwise see infrequently or not at all.
Author James Rodriguez: "Programs like this expose how the real cost of incarceration extends far beyond a courtroom sentence, landing squarely on children forced to grow up at vending machine prices and behind plexiglass."
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