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

Abstract

© 2022 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 351–356. 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