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The nationally acclaimed engrossing, disturbing, at times heartbreaking (Van Jones) book that shines a harsh light on the abusive world of juvenile prisons, by the award-winning journalist
Nell Bernstein's book could be for juvenile justice what Rachel Carson's book was for the environmental movement. --Andrew Cohen, correspondent, ABC News
When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Brian got into it on the court, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range with a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month.
One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about what motivates young people to change. In what the San Francisco Chronicle calls an epic work of investigative journalism that lays bare our nation's brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and is a clarion call to bring our children home, Nell Bernstein eloquently argues that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isolation denies children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults.
Bernstein introduces us to youth across the nation who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state. She presents these youths all as fully realized people, not victims. As they describe in their own voices their fight to maintain their humanity and protect their individuality in environments that would deny both, these young people offer a hopeful alternative to the doomed effort to reform a system that should only be dismantled. Interwoven with these heartrending stories is reporting on innovative programs that provide effective alternatives to putting children behind bars.
A landmark book, Burning Down the House sparked a national conversation about our inhumane and ineffectual juvenile prisons, and ultimately makes the radical argument that the only path to justice is for state-run detention centers to be abolished completely.
Over the past twenty years, one state after another has shuttered its youth prisons and stopped trying kids as adults, slashing the number of children locked in cages by a stunning 75 percent. How did this remarkable change come about? In the sequel to her 2014 award-winning book Burning Down the House, journalist Nell Bernstein dissects the forces that converged to move us from a moral panic about juvenile superpredators to a time in which the youth prison is rapidly fading from view.
In Our Future, We Are Free begins and ends with the imprisoned youth who took a leading role in their own liberation. Through vivid profiles, Bernstein chronicles the tireless work of mothers, activists, litigators, researchers, and journalists to expose and challenge the racist brutality of youth prisons--as well as the surprising story of prison officials who worked from the inside to close their institutions for good. The descriptions of how communities are pursuing safety, rehabilitation, and accountability outside of locked institutions offers a model for how we might overcome our addiction to incarceration writ large.
In Our Future, We Are Free is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how large-scale social change happens.
