Susana's dad is an inmate at San Quentin State Prison, serving 21 years to life under California's rigid "three strikes" sentencing law. Caught four years ago with stolen property -- and not for the first time -- he's been determined by the court to be of no further value outside of prison. Unfortunately, he is of vital importance to Susana (not her real name).

There are more than 1.5 million men incarcerated in the United States today. The majority of them are fathers. It's a role that may not have been central to their lives before they were arrested -- most did not live with their children, nor with the mothers of those children. Certainly their status as fathers is barely recognized by prison administrators or advocacy groups. Of the limited number of programs that aim to sustain family bonds during incarceration, the great majority are aimed at female prisoners.

On one level, it's a bias that makes sense. When children lose a mother to jail or prison, they often lose a caretaker and provider; when they lose a father, they are more likely to lose a visitor. But of the 10 million children whose lives have been touched by parental incarceration, the vast majority has experienced the loss of a father. In sheer numbers, these missing fathers represent an absence to be reckoned with. And as Susana's experience indicates, just because your dad didn't live with you before he was arrested doesn't mean you don't miss him or need him once he is gone.

Susana is locked up in a juvenile hall right next door to the county jail where she came to know her father during sporadic visits over the course of nearly a decade. She's a pretty, broad-faced girl with wide-set brown eyes, a chipped front tooth and long reddish-brown hair that drapes over her county-issue sweatshirt. In a glassed-in interview room with white cinder block walls and a concrete floor, Susana talks at length about the dad who spent most of her childhood in the place she refers to as "next door."

"My dad's handsome," she says with a rare smile. "I wish I had pictures of him. He's tall, he's muscular. He has my face, with a mustache and thicker eyebrows, and then his hair is shaved in the back, shaved on the sides, and he slicks it back with gel."

Her father has told her stories, Susana says, about their early days together, when he was free and she was small and he would pick her up and take her places, carry her in his arms. Susana can't recall a single image from that time. Her memories of him start when she was 5 or 6 years old, when her grandmother would come get her at the foster home where she spent most of her early years and take her downtown to see her dad.

"We had to wait in a waiting room for a really long time," Susana remembers, "and when we finally got in he was behind glass and you had to talk on a phone." Susana's foster mother had discouraged her from talking about or seeing her parents, and so, with the narcissism of a small child, she assumed the conventions of the visiting room existed to obstruct her in particular: "I figured they were trying to keep us apart, and that's why there was glass and a telephone, and we couldn't touch each other."

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