Portraying Issues of Incarceration and (In)Justice for Young Readers

Abstract

Portraying Issues of Incarceration and (In)Justice for Young Readers Ramona Caponegro (bio) 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which brought unprecedented attention to the ongoing discrimination present in the US criminal justice system and its many devastating effects, particularly in Black and Latinx communities. In the preface to the tenth anniversary edition, Alexander states, "It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed" (ix). Alexander is describing the seemingly rapid changes and ongoing stagnation in how the United States deals with its racial (racist) history and the use of mass incarceration as a means of racial and social control. Numerous other scholarly and popular works, fiction and nonfiction, have also continued to address the inequities built into the US legal system. These representations and analyses have been accompanied by steps both forward and backward in terms of the law's evolution and its enforcement. As more frequent discussions about the criminal justice system have entered the public consciousness again, more books about trials, prisons, and the effects of mass incarceration have been published for children and young adults. I wrote my first graduate term paper on children's books about prisons in 2004, and I finished my dissertation about representations of the legal system for young readers in the Victorian era and the contemporary era—two periods of massive prison expansion—in 2010. Since completing this project, I've been heartened to see not only more books about incarceration being published, but also that these books explore legal systems and issues of incarceration in increasingly complex ways and from a greater variety of perspectives, while often gaining more critical attention.1 For example, in Milo Imagines the World (2021), written by Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson, a new, more expansive take on the [End Page 351] visiting-an-incarcerated-parent picture book emerges, in which Milo is able to envision multiple possibilities for the people he observes on the subway ride to the prison, just as he sees his mother as far more than a person who is currently behind bars. As Milo's picture of his family indicates, her incarceration does not wholly define their relationship, nor is it the focus of the book, which emphasizes the limitations of people's outward appearances to reveal their stories. Kimberly Brubaker Bradley's middle grade novel Fighting for Words (2020) also includes a mother who is incarcerated, albeit one who appears far less loving than Milo's mother. However, the novel focuses more on how two sisters deal with the traumatic aftermath of sexual abuse, including their decisions about testifying against their abuser. While Bradley makes it abundantly clear that numerous institutions, including the legal system, let the sisters down horribly, Della, the younger sister, still sees the courtroom and prison as the best defenses against their abuser, both for them and for society. In contrast, the young adult verse novel Punching the Air (2020) by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five, highlights the repeated failures of the US criminal justice system, first in sending Amal to prison and then in its continual efforts to dehumanize him and the other inmates. Zoboi and Salaam, echoing points made by Alexander, stress the connections between slavery and incarceration: My life, my whole damn lifebefore that courtroombefore that trialbefore that nightwas like Africa And this door leads to a slave shipAnd maybe jail maybe jailis is America. (61) These three books, aimed at three different audiences and focused on characters with different connections to the legal system, tell readers vastly different stories, though none of the stories present the system in a fully positive light. Of course, the stories vary because of their different intended audiences and formats, but also because the legal system is so complicated, making it essential for young readers to learn about it from multiple perspectives while they're growing up. The audiences for these stories include future voters and, ideally, changemakers, emphasizing the need to present people in the criminal justice system as complex, fully...