By The Editors

“Incarceration is becoming the new American apartheid and poor children of color are the fodder,” said leading children’s advocate, Marian Wright Edelman, President and Founder of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), in her latest ChildWatch column, featured on HuffingtonPost.

Edelman, a lifelong advocate for disadvantaged Americans who began her career as director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson Mississippi in the 1960s, goes on to state that “Child poverty and neglect, racial disparities in systems that serve children, and the pipeline to prison, are not acts of God. They are America’s immoral political and economic choices that can and must be changed with strong political, corporate and community leadership.”

CDF’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline ® Campaign points out that one in 3 black and one in 6 Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime nationwide. A significant number of girls are entering the juvenile justice system, “endangering children at younger and younger ages.”

The campaign works to keep children out of the pipeline by increasing preventive supports and services children need, including access to early education, education services and accessible, comprehensive health coverage.

• Read Edelman’s full “America’s New Apartheid” column
• Read the latest Children’s Defense Fund report about the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline and learn how you can help