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Dorothy Gaines knows firsthand the burdens prison can put on a family. She was in federal prison for seven years with three children at home.

"My oldest daughter was 18," she says. "She had to come out of college, and try to take care of them. So it was a lot of stress on her, as well as a lot of stress with me worried about them."

Gaines, now 67, has been out for 25 years – long enough, she says, to see the effects she believes her prison time had on all her children, but especially on her son, who was nine years old at the time. For more than 10 years now, he has been serving his own prison sentence.

Now, Gaines tries to make sure she never misses a phone call from him and sends him money so he can buy food from the commissary, even though she can't always afford it. This year, she's worried she'll lose her housing by the end of the summer.

"I'll go without sometimes, so I can make sure I can accept a phone call from him," she says. "I try and put some type of money on his book so he can have soup or something he can eat. I know what it's like to go to bed hungry."

Nearly one in two Americans has had an immediate family member incarcerated, with Black people being more likely than white and Hispanic people to experience this. That's a problem, in part, because having a relative in prison is expensive.

According to a report released this week from FWD.us, an advocacy organization aimed at criminal justice reform, having a loved one in prison or jail is estimated to cost families across the country nearly $350 billion each year – about four times the amount the federal government estimates it costs taxpayers annually to operate the nation's prisons and jails.

On average, people with a family member behind bars spend around $4,000 a year on their incarcerated loved ones, the report says.

"That's a lot of money for anybody," says Zoë Towns, the organization's executive director. "It's important to understand that it's actually falling on those families that can least afford it."

Towns' organization, in partnership with researchers at Duke University and NORC, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Chicago, surveyed more than 1,600 people and conducted focus groups to identify the wide range of costs that come with having a family member in prison or jail: Families pay for emails and phone calls to their loved ones. They spend money traveling to visit them. Like Gaines, they send what they can for commissary purchases.

Families lose income too, before and after incarceration. During prison or jail time, the person behind bars can no longer make much money themselves, and often other family members have to adjust — staying home or cutting their hours, for instance, to care for children. And even afterward, the person incarcerated and their family members often keep making less money, the report found.

Other organizations have identified this financial burden as well: In 2015, the Ella Baker Center For Human Rights found that nearly 2 in 3 families with someone behind bars were unable to meet their family's basic needs.

The FWD.us report comes at a time when incarceration rates across the U.S. are creeping back upward after more than a decade of decline. Felicity Rose, the organization's vice president of criminal justice policy and research, says it also comes at a time when more Americans are worried about affording basic necessities, like groceries and housing.

"We thought it was really important to help bring those issues together so people can see how they're related, because they are related. There's a lot of people and families in this country who are impacted by incarceration. And the numbers that we had about how that impact was felt were really not comprehensive enough," says Rose.

The study has its limitations. Survey respondents estimated many of the costs themselves, for instance. The findings reached by other organizations on how much prison and jail actually costs people also vary widely. In 2017, for instance, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated the country's prison and jail systems cost taxpayers and the families of incarcerated people around $180 billion per year.

But Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, says specific numbers aren't as important as simply the act of trying to quantify what incarceration does to families.

"The value of that number is that it's a way to say that this matters," he says. "That number is typically more than anyone would imagine, and it's a number that, when you look at it in the context of poor families, is completely inappropriate … What you end up with is a very expensive, inefficient way to make poor people have a harder time to succeed."

Yet some of the ways in which that happens are hard to quantify.

Lex Steppling, a community organizer who grew up in Los Angeles in the '90s, says both his father and step-father spent time in prison. Steppling had to drop out of high school to work. But even so, he says his younger brother had a tougher time adjusting to life without their fathers.

"My brother's dad was very handy. He was a mechanic, he was a carpenter. My brother really had an aptitude for that," he says. "So he gets taken out of the picture, and then my brother doesn't have that person anymore."

Steppling says his brother lost out on having those skills passed down from one generation to the next, and ended up spending time in prison as well.

"It's very painful to have people in your family just snatched up out of your life and thrown into a fortress," he says. "What it does to people's work prospects and the generational strain it puts on families is immeasurable."

Copyright 2025, NPR

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At Xcel Energy’s Sherco Solar project near Becker, thousands of solar panels stretch across a field of native plants and flowers.

If those plants grow too tall, they could block the sun and keep the panels from producing full power. So the vegetation needs regular trimming.

Xcel is getting help from an unusual labor source: hundreds and soon thousands of sheep, which graze beneath the solar panels and keep the vegetation tidy.

Last week, a truck pulling a trailer bumped down a gravel road past endless rows of solar arrays. A crew jumped out and attached a metal ramp to the back of the trailer, then opened the gate. Hundreds of sheep and lambs clambered down the ramp, spread out into the field and started munching beneath the solar panels.

“By the end of the project, there will be several thousand sheep out here,” said Briana Beck, project supervisor for Minnesota Native Landscapes or MNL, an ecological restoration company based in Otsego. 

MNL is contracting with Xcel Energy to provide the sheep grazing at Sherco Solar, Minnesota’s largest solar energy farm near Becker, which started producing power last fall. 

Xcel is building this massive solar project to replace some of the electricity generated by the nearby Sherco coal-fired power plant, which it’s retiring by 2030. Eventually, Sherco Solar will have 1.6 million solar panels and will generate enough electricity to power about 150,000 homes.

These days, most large solar projects have pollinator habitat planted underneath the panels. The native plants and flowers support bees and butterflies.

Sheep are a cost- and time-saving way to manage vegetation and keep the plants from growing over the solar panels, said Luke Molus, operations manager for Sherco Solar.

“They graze all day long,” he said. “If you had someone come out here to actually cut the grass and mow it down, it does take a lot longer and is a little more expensive.”

So far, the sheep are doing a “fantastic” job, Molus said.

“The (vegetation) is getting trimmed down to what we need, and it's looking great,” he said. 

Grazing animals on a solar farm is an example of agrivoltaics, a growing practice of pairing renewable energy with agriculture that provides mutual benefits. 

More than 113,000 sheep grazed 129,000 acres of solar farms last year, according to the American Solar Grazing Association. That included 500 sites in 33 states.

Minnesota Native Landscapes has sheep grazing on about 50 solar farms in Minnesota, plus others in Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. 

MNL owner Joe Schaffer said he expects the demand for solar sheep to grow. The U.S. needs about 10 million acres of solar panels in the coming decades to meet the nation's net-zero carbon goal. 

“Almost all has vegetation or forage growing on it, and it's always going to be fenced in,” Schaffer said. “So they’re super perfect for grazing large quantities of sheep.”

Beck said sheep are ideal to manage a restored native prairie, which bison grazed long ago.

“Obviously, you cannot bring bison into a solar field. They’re a little bit too big,” she said.

But sheep are small enough to graze underneath the solar panels. They forage on a variety of plants, and they can get into cracks and crevices that are tough for a mower to reach, Beck said.

“They can get in those small spaces where you'd have to do hand trimming,” she said. “They're physically removing the vegetation, which means there's less thatch buildup. And the thatch buildup can be a fire risk, which is a big concern on solar.”

Sheep’s hooves aerate the soil, and their manure acts as a natural fertilizer — all contributing to a healthier prairie, Beck said.

“If you improve the soil, then you’ll have healthier, more diverse habitats, which supports more pollinators,” she said.

Bees and butterflies help neighboring farmers by pollinating their crops. MNL also partners with local producers to give them access to solar farms to graze their animals, Beck said.

“That helps a lot with acceptance in the local community, if (farmers) can see the benefits directly to them,” she said.

Research studies also have found that solar grazing can lead to happier and healthier animals, who prefer the shade provided by the solar panels.

When it’s complete, Sherco Solar will cover almost 5,000 acres of former potato fields, and will be one of the largest restored prairies in Minnesota. The sheep are expected to be around for a long time to keep it in shape, Schaffer said.

“As the site grows, so too will the flock,” he said.

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American Public Media, an affiliate of MPR News, said Monday it was in active talks to sell the Brains On! Universe, an award-winning science podcast for children and young adults. The sale will eliminate 15 positions.

“This is not the outcome we hoped for, as these are valued colleagues and award-winning, rightfully beloved content,” Chandra Kavati, APM’s president, wrote in an email Monday. “This has been a hard decision, and we are deeply saddened to say goodbye to this team.”

Kavati cited challenges in monetizing audio content for kids and families as the reason for the sale, adding that the APM Studios unit plans to “thoughtfully inform the audience of this change.”

Brains On! Is a weekly podcast where kids can co-host a show to find answers to questions they have about the world. The podcast has more than 100 episodes with four other franchises on debate, history and fun facts.

Other APM Studios podcasts like The Splendid Table and The Slowdown will be brought under the umbrella of the national brand American Public Media.

American Public Media is a unit of American Public Media Group, the parent company of MPR News.

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