As the bus rattled toward the State Correctional Institution-Graterford, Jorge Cintron Jr. could barely contain his excitement, a nearly childlike giddiness. Though the journey had been 14 hours, most of it in shackles, he wasn’t close to tired.

To the other weary inmates in mustard-yellow “D.O.C.” jumpsuits, what loomed ahead was just another prison: same bars and barbed wire, same bland food, same thin mattresses. But Cintron was about to be with his father, his namesake — the role model he had followed into the drug world, into court on murder charges, and then into prison, their twin life sentences imposed eight years apart.

It had been 20 years since he had last seen the man everyone said he took after. “Lil Lolo,” his father’s friends from Philadelphia’s Fairhill section would call him. Now, he was about to come face to face with Jorge Cintron Sr., Lolo himself.

“I hadn’t hugged my father in so many years, or heard his voice,” Cintron Jr. said. “It was bittersweet, because we’re both in prison and having to see each other in here.”

Since that day in 2011, Cintron Jr., 38, has lived on the same cell block as his father, who is 58. Recently, the cell next door to his dad’s became available, so he moved in. Each evening, by 9 p.m., they lock themselves into cells 86 and 87 of A Block for the night.

Their story is, in some ways, not an unusual one. All around them are inmates who come from the same neighborhoods, the same city blocks or even the same households. Father and son hail from one of the most heavily incarcerated communities in one of the most incarcerated cities in the country. And just as crime gravitates to certain neighborhoods, it also clusters in families: According to one criminologist’s analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 5 percent of families account for more than 50 percent of all arrests.

Numerous studies have found that individuals whose parents have committed crimes are at least two times more likely to be perpetrators themselves. Sexual offending runs in families. So does violent crime.

In Pennsylvania, the Department of Corrections does not keep statistics on familial relationships between inmates. Graterford’s public-information officer said she had no way of tracking it.

But Darryl Goodman, who was locked up with his own father at Graterford before dedicating his life to helping at-risk young people, has been piecing together a data set with help from inmates at the 25 prisons around the state. By his most recent reckoning, (and it’s hard to keep up, as inmates constantly are being moved) there were 243 fathers in state prisons with their sons. At Graterford alone, he counted 41 father-son pairs, including 17 sets of cellmates. He found seven families in which a father, son and grandson were all locked up together.

Cintron Jr. finds those numbers plausible: “On the block right now, there are probably three or four sets of brothers. And there are fathers and sons on my block. Just on the block alone, there are families, cousins. There is nothing for it. It’s the cycle. It’s the generational curse.”

On the block right now, there are probably three or four sets of brothers. And there are fathers and sons on my block. Just on the block alone, there are families, cousins. — Jorge Cintron Jr.

That crime runs in families is not news to those in corrections.

But that there are regular family reunions in the visiting rooms of state prisons reflects an incarceration rate that — despite attempts to turn the tide — remains at near historically high levels and deeply concentrated in poor communities of color. By one estimation, there are 36,000 black men ages 25 to 54 missing from Philadelphia, either killed or incarcerated. Philadelphia leaders are working to cut the city jail roster by one-third in three years, while the state system has shed about 3,000 inmates since the population peaked at more than 51,000 inmates in 2009. But these efforts seek to bend a curve that tracked upward for decades. Pennsylvania admitted more than 19,000 state inmates in 2016, including parole violators; that annual figure remains double what it was 20 years ago, even as the violent crime rate has declined.

More Prison Admissions,

Far Steeper Sentences Since 1990, the population of Pennsylvania's prisons has tripled, but the number of inmates with sentences of 20 years or more has increased at a far faster pace. Cumulative percentage change since 1990 Staff Graphic

Meanwhile, a major challenge to decarceration — and yet another factor that finds extended families and whole neighborhoods bumping into one another behind bars — is that prison sentences remain longer than ever before. According to a 2012 Pew analysis, Pennsylvania’s inmates were the second-longest-serving in the nation. The average sentence for a state inmate is 30 percent longer than it was 20 years ago. And very long sentences are imposed with far greater frequency, according to Pennsylvania Corrections Department statistics. Since 1990, the number of prisoners serving more than 20 years increased 714 percent. The number sentenced to life without parole increased 155 percent to 5,448; only Florida has more such lifers.

Some young inmates now serving long sentences for serious crimes said they grew up in awe of their fathers, and wanted to be just like them. But what they absorbed was a legacy of absence, neglect, and abuse — chaotic lives, framed by violence and poverty.

Goodman recalled childhood weekends spent visiting his father at Graterford. “The whole visiting room is filled with joy and love, and psychologically it had an effect. I wanted to be a part of whatever he was into,” he said. By 1989, he was in on a 15-year sentence for a series of armed robberies and a murder; then, he got to see the rest of the prison.

Others saw their fathers as mere cautionary tales.

“I always had the mindset, ‘That’s not going to be me,’ ” said Julian Dan, 27, whose father is at Graterford on a life sentence. Since December 2016, Dan has been there with him, on a gun conviction.

Some inmates were together by request; for some of them, it took more than 10 years for the transfer to come through. Others connected by chance. These convergences can last a few days or decades. Sometimes, they’re life-changing. In prison, fathers attempt, often for the first time, to parent: to spark faith in God, to instill the importance of hard work and honest living, of family, of education. As for the sons, they finally start to understand who their fathers really are. In these cramped cells, there’s no room for pedestals.

But what concerns Goodman, the reason he’s made a study of this phenomenon, is that many of those sons have sons, kids and teenagers prepared to follow right behind them. Pennsylvania state inmates, collectively, have 81,000 children at home.