Watching Childhood Through Bars

There are images that do not need explanation.

A father standing in shadow. Bars between him and the light. Children running freely in the distance — laughing, growing, becoming.

That image is not symbolic for me. It is lived experience.

When Byron was sentenced, his sons were under a year old. Still babies. Still needing to be held, kissed, reassured. In that courtroom, as his future was sealed, the judge refused to allow him to hold or kiss his children goodbye.

No mercy in the moment. No acknowledgment of the human cost. No recognition that children were being sentenced, too.

That was the last time Byron saw his sons as infants.

From that day forward, he watched their childhood from behind bars — not physically, but spiritually, emotionally, imaginatively. Every holiday passed without him. Every birthday candle was blown out without his voice in the room. He missed scraped knees and school plays, graduations and growing pains, first questions about the world and the ache of becoming young men without their father’s presence.

Those babies are adults now.

And that is what makes this image unbearable.

The justice system often counts years, but it rarely counts moments. It tallies sentences without measuring what is lost when a father is erased from daily life — not because of danger to society, but because punishment has replaced proportionality.

There is a cruel mythology that incarceration affects only the individual. That myth collapses when you listen to children who grew up visiting prisons instead of playgrounds, who learned early how to love through glass and letters, who internalized absence as normal.

What kind of justice refuses a final goodbye?

What kind of system believes accountability requires the permanent rupture of families — even when rehabilitation, review, and correction are possible?

This is not an argument for ignoring harm. It is a plea to stop multiplying it.

Children should never be collateral damage. Fathers should not be reduced to silhouettes in their own families’ lives. And justice should never be so rigid that it forgets mercy is part of its design.

The image of a man watching children play from behind bars is haunting because it is real — and because it didn’t have to be this way.

Time cannot be returned. But justice can still be pursued.

And until it is, we will continue to tell the truth — for the fathers watching from shadows, and for the children who grew up too fast, carrying an absence they did not choose.

Rev. Jamesina E. Greene

A Mother's Cry