The United States, with nearly two million people behind bars at any given time, has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. The nation spends about $182 billion annually on prisons, with little progress on rehabilitation or crime prevention.
America’s outsized prison population can be traced to decades of “tough on crime” policies, including the “War on Drugs,” leading to longer mandatory minimum sentences and “three-strikes” laws. The racial disparities in the U.S. prison system are stark, owing to endemic bias in the criminal justice system and growing economic inequality.
While the U.S. today incarcerates more young people than any other country in the world, the total number of children serving time in America’s prisons has dramatically declined over the past 25 years. Award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein, who’s spent years writing about the juvenile justice system and the impact of prison on young lives, is the author of “Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison,” and “All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated.” Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Bernstein about her newest book, “In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison,” which recounts how over the last two decades a coalition of parents, activists, and prison officials launched a successful campaign in states across the U.S. to end the prosecution of young people as adults, slashing the number of children behind bars by a stunning 75 percent.
NELL BERNSTEIN: Tallulah was a horrific institution. Kids there were routinely brutalized. One of the more shocking details I uncovered was that at one point they brought in a warden from the Angola State Penitentiary to kind of try to restore order. And even he was shocked to find that, as he put it, nearly every kid had a broken nose or a perforated eardrum.
That said, you could find these kinds of abuses and practices like putting children in solitary confinement, underfeeding them. Just every kind of neglect and abuse in every state in the country. And that was true in the ’90s and it is true today, even though there’s been a lot of progress on reducing the number of kids who were incarcerated. I keep track of this stuff and every day I wake up to horror stories in my inbox. So Tallula was particularly bad, but this is happening in every state in the country.
SCOTT HARRIS: You talk about the campaign that was organized, I think kicked off by mothers of incarcerated young people, they eventually triumphed, as you talk about in the book. I wonder if you could talk about the strategies and tactics that this group of political neophytes successfully employed which eventually years later shut down that notorious correction center for youth.
NELL BERNSTEIN: Yeah. What the mothers did in Louisiana was just one piece of a larger puzzle involving young people themselves. Movement lawyers, advocates, politicians, even some system leaders. But they did two things that I think are central to any effort to close a prison. Prisons depend on invisibility to function. There’s a reason that we put them in the middle of nowhere. The gates and bars and razorwire that keep kids inside them also function to keep the rest of us out. And the other thing that I think these prisons depend on is dehumanization. The abuses that children experience are so extreme that in order to justify them, we have to call the kids superpredators and just not look at them in their full humanity.
So what the mothers did was they pierced this veil of invisibility and they essentially demanded that their children be seen as human. In California, mothers stood outside the gates with signs, with pictures of their children as beaming toddlers, just to say, “This is a child like any other child.”
In Louisiana, the parents conducted a series of sort of dramatic street theater actions. At one point, they held a jazz funeral in New Orleans to symbolize the mourning of their children’s youth and their children’s dreams and they pulled a casket down the street. There were jazz bands. So yeah, they were neophytes to start. But they were also out of desperation, very quick studies. And in Louisiana, they had a strong partnership with civil rights attorneys. They triumphed in the sense that they closed Tallula.
But 25 years later, a new generation of parents is fighting, for example, to protect kids who were sent to the old death row at Angola a couple of years ago. Angola is a notorious prison. It’s a former slave plantation where men still work the fields under the watch of armed guards. So, fewer kids. But the horrors to which we’re willing to subject them remain almost unbelievable. And these parents are still fighting 25 years later.
For more information, visit Nell Bernstein’s author website at nellbernstein.com.
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