FYS: Storytelling, Identity, and Social Change - Juvenile in Justice lyrics

"Juvenile In Justice is a project to document the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, a**ist and, occasionally, harm them." Juvenile in Justice is a project, website, and book spear-headed by the photographer Richard Ross, intended to, as the website puts it, "visualize" the juvenile justice system. The project includes Ross's photographs as well as interviews with kids (and some administrators) in juvenile facilities, both detention centers and correctional centers. To date, Ross has photographed and interviewed over 1000 people for this project. A core aim of the project is educational. The website and book have spawned a lecture tour and a traveling exhibition, and the goal of all pieces of the project is to awaken people to the realities of juvenile incarceration in the United States. One tool Ross uses for this are factoids spread throughout the website and book and interspersed with the photographs, alerting us to statistics like: "According to the American Correctional Association, the average cost to incarcerate a juvenile for a 9-12 month period is between $66,000 and $88,000. In California, the cost is $224,712." "Approximately 70,000 young people are in detention or correctional facilities every day in the United States." "Youth housed in adult jails are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than youth housed in juvenile detention facilities." (Juvenile in Justice p. 85) At the core of the project, though, are the photographs of, and accompanying stories from, young people entangled in the juvenile justice system. In the book, we hear from people like "A.W.," 16 years old and in a Youth Training Center in Nevada, who explains: "Being gay in a place like this is hell. A lot of guys think they can have s** with me anytime they want because they are in prison so it doesn't make them gay. And it doesn't count as long as they are giving rather than getting....I am here for 4 to 6 months...but I am not sure I will make it." (p. 98) Many of the young people interviewed talk about the difficult and abusive situations that led them to jail, often from a very young age. As "R," age 16 explains: "I have been running away my whole life. My parents divorced when I was 4. My father s**ually abused me from age 5 to 9. My stepmother physically abused me. I was kidnapped by a pimp and prostituted out." (p. 176) While the book Juvenile in Justice includes only the voices of young people, and some administrators in the facilities that house them, the website includes a section called "Family in Justice," in which family members describe what they have witnessed and experienced as their loved ones have made their way to and into the criminal justice system. One mom on this part of the site describes the changes she has seen in son, who was sent to an adult jail for a crime committed when he was 16. As she tries to reason through what she has seen, she says, "I really thought the system was going to help me change my kid. But that's not what the criminal justice system is set up for. It's no parent's friend and that is something I found out the hard way. They don't really care about these kids. And that broke my heart because I'd always believed in the system." Changing people's minds about the system seems to be the main aim of this project. More than simply "educating" people, Ross hopes to change the way we relate to the criminal justice system, to make us more aware of, and also angry about, a system that does very little to rehabilitate even the youngest who end up a part of it. In his afterword, Ross talks about this goal as one that emerged as he worked on the project. At first, in his words, when the project began (in 2006) he "wanted to give a voice to those with the least amount of authority in any U.S. confinement system" (p. 188). But by the end he was committed not only to making the images and sharing the stories, but to ensuring that they would be used as tools to advocate for changes in the system. To that end, as he describes, he has been "giving license to the images, free of charge, to all facilities and advocates in the field" (p. 189). While the majority of stories included in the book are results of interviews conducted by Richard Ross, the blog is also set up to collect additional stories about how the juvenile justice system has impacted young people and their families.