Events / Screening & Discussion: “When the Bough Breaks”

Screening & Discussion: “When the Bough Breaks”

February 24, 2017
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Whitaker Hall

Panel discussion with policy makers, advocates, and a daughter of the experience

Moderated by Barbara Baumgartner, Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and Associate Director of the Washington University Prison Education Project.


About When the Bough Breaks

When mothers go to prison, their children suffer with them. Most female inmates are mothers, and most are locked up for non-violent offenses. As prison populations rise, so does the problem of lost children -already a quarter million of them.

In When the Bough Breaks, an Emmy Award-winning, hour-long documentary about the children of mothers in prison, Jill Evans Petzall looks at this complex issue from the children’s perspectives. It shows one year in the homes of in three Missouri
families. The children’s day-to-day lives gives a clear picture of how our justice system perpetuates the very problems it seeks to prevent.

This documentary questions who does the harder time, the inmate mothers, or their children? The youngsters make clear that, regardless of a mothers’ crime, the urgent desire for her love shapes their lives. Responsibilities confronting our society become real through their young, articulate voices.