Walmart was founded on the value of equitable opportunity. Racial equity is critical to their mission and their business. Incarceration in the US disproportionately affects people of color and creates a cycle of incarceration.

There are over 2 million people incarcerated in the US, creating 2.7 million unintended victims of the criminal justice system - the children. The problem is pervasive, with 1 in 28 children in the US having a parent behind bars.

The children of the incarcerated face tremendous adversity from the absence of the parental figure - anxiety, depression and academic and literacy issues. Childhood illiteracy is an indicator of future incarceration and it’s reported that 66% of children who cannot read by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare.

With Bedtime Stories, we nurture bonds through books and literacy to help break the cycle of generational incarceration.

Bedtimes Stories connects incarcerated parents and their children through the power of reading. The program simulates for the child the experience of reading together with their separated parent to nurture bonds and improve literacy.

How it works: Within the jail, the inmate makes an audio recording of themselves reading a children’s book. That recording is uploaded to the Bedtime Stories cloud server. Outside the jail at home, the child can access the secure recording with the Bedtime Stories app to hear their parent read a book for them just as if they are side by side.

When the child hovers the AR-enabled app over the pages of the book’s physical copy, the parent’s voice comes to life reading the book, page by page through image recognition. In addition, the parent can read special messages for their child, further simulating the read-together experience.

One of the leading indicators of future incarceration is childhood literacy. 66% of children who cannot read by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare.

Reading with your child is the number one way to improve their literacy. But what about those parents unable to read with their child, the millions of incarcerated parents.

We partnered with Contextos, an organization providing education services at Cook County Jail, the second largest in the US with a population of 4,500 inmates - providing access to hundreds of incarcerated parents.

The separation caused by incarceration demanded a mobile-forward solution, given our audience of children - the most tech savvy generation to date.

The approach was to simulate the side by side reading of a parent and child. We brought that to life using image recognition and augmented reality in a mobile friendly environment.

Bedtime Stories was implemented at the second largest jail, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in the US.

The initial phase of our program was a 10-week cycle that included forty detainees reading stories to their children, nieces and nephews and grandchildren. Within a special classroom inside CCDOC, each inmate could choose from a selection of books curated by the Chicago Public Library. The incarcerated parents individually read each story into a special recording device that was transferred to the Bedtime Stories app.

10-week cycles run quarterly at CCDOC, with the goal of expanding Bedtime Stories and making it available in more communities and correctional facilities throughout the US.

Walmart was founded on the value of equitable opportunity. Racial equity is critical to their mission and their business. Incarceration in the US disproportionately affects people of color and creates a cycle of incarceration. Bedtime Stories helps break that cycle with a literacy program between a parent and child.

Every detail was considered - from the welcome animation to the Netflix inspired UX, children were at the core of all creative decisions. Bedtime Stories recreates the special experience of a parent and child reading together. Through the Bedtime Stories app, image recognition cues the parent’s voice page by page. Further, the app brings the parent’s voice to life with an imagination inspired augmented reality waveform.

The seamless UX allows the child to simply hover their smartphone over the physical book, bringing classic children’s stories to life with technology that enables the parent’s voice to read the story like they are right beside the child in their bedroom.

This program led to educational reform and noticeable change to the inmate rehabilitation process within the Cook County Department of Corrections.

Walmart was founded on the value of equitable opportunity. Racial equity is critical to their mission and their business. Incarceration in the US disproportionately affects people of color and creates a cycle of incarceration. Bedtime Stories helps break that cycle with a literacy program between a parent and child.

The launch of Bedtime Stories at the nation’s second largest jail has impacted many families, becoming a model for other communities and correctional facilities across America.