Children Caught in America's Prison System
/A fifth-grader was brought to a concrete cell in a juvenile-detention center in Washoe County, Nev., asked to remove his shoes and belt, and stayed from 10 a.m to 6:30 p.m. waiting for his mother, an undocumented immigrant, to pick him up.
He was there for scuffling with another kid at school that day and he was “scared shitless,” says Richard Ross, a University of California, Santa Barbara photography professor who spent five years interviewing more than 1,000 children in over 300 juvenile detention centers. It was just one of many scenes Ross witnessed while taking photographs for his new book, Juvenile in Justice, that led him to believe, as he told The Daily Beast, “we have the wrong population in there.”
There are 70,792 children in America’s juvenile jails -- a population that the general public is just beginning to pay attention to, Ross says.
Recent victories for juvenile offenders are largely the result of a “successful public education campaign,” says Ashley Nellis, a research analyst specializing in juvenile justice at The Sentencing Project. “Even five years ago, people didn’t know that juveniles served sentences of life without parole in America.”
Nellis is the author of The Sentencing Project report, The Lives of Juvenile Lifers: Findings from a National Survey.
The sheer expense of keeping kids behind bars has begun to raise awareness, Ross says, citing the high cost to taxpayers of supporting a child—from food to education—in juvenile jail.
