Wisconsin has the dubious distinction of having higher than national averages for youth incarceration and Black youth are ten times more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers. On today’s show, host Dana Pellebon is joined by Nell Bernstein, author of In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison to talk about the youth and families leading the charge to close youth prisons and end the dehumanization of incarceration. 

In the 90s, Bernstein was an editor at a San Francisco youth newspaper at the height of youth incarceration in the nation. She watched as young writers for the paper would get picked up by police and “chewed up by the system.” Though there’s been a 75% drop in youth incarceration since the 90s, youth prisons are the same as they were 30 years ago. Given euphemistic names like “Lincoln Hill School,” these facilities are bound by razor wire and the children incarcerated there sleep in cell blocks.

Bernstein calls these institutions the real source of recidivism because dehumanization goes hand in hand with incarceration. She gives examples of how a white community in Illinois fought to keep its youth prison open because they were financially profiting from it, and how in Louisiana, mothers successfully closed a youth prison where their children were being abused. Resistance has been led by those most impacted, like the tenacious youth who documented their conditions and sent letters to advocates who then successfully spread their stories such that California closed its youth prison network. Bernstein says that imprisoning children only happens when the system makes harm invisible and at the same time dehumanizes Black and Brown children.

Despite some resistance, Bernstein says that there’s growing interest across the country in charging children as adults, undoing decades of reform work and running counter to the science of the adolescent brain. She says that the key to ending the racial targeting of the justice system is to better resource Black and Brown communities. The vast majority of Americans have broken the law in some way when they were an adolescent, but most were “rehabilitated” by living in a community where their activities weren’t policed. She gives an example from California, where organizations like Young Women’s Freedom Center are using housing programs to successfully keep girls out of jail.

Nell Bernstein is the author of Burning Down the House, winner of the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award; All Alone in the World, a Newsweek Book of the Week; and In Our Future We Are Free (all published by The New Press). She is a former Soros Justice Media Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a winner of a White House Champion of Change award. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Glamour, Salon, Mother Jones, and other publications.

Featured image of the cover of In Our Future We Are Free by Nell Bernstein.

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