This project was funded in part by the non-profit my partner works at and was a collaboration with their juvenile justice unit.
The book is the winner of the 2012 Best News and Documentary Photography Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for a selection published in Harper’s Magazine.
Hopefully the photographs in Juvenile in Justice open our eyes to the world of the incarceration of American youth. The nearly 150 images in this book were made over 5 years of visiting more than 1,000 youth confined in juvenile detention institutions around the United States.
http://www.juvenile-in-justice.com/
From a press release:
America’s heavy reliance on juvenile incarceration is unique among the developed nations of the world.
Juvenile In Justice is a project to document the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them.
And:
The project includes images of over 1,000 juveniles and administrators in over 200 facilities in 31 states in the U.S, plus extensive information collected from interviews. The hope is that by seeing these images, people will have a better understanding of the conditions that exist. Children’s identities are always protected and faces are never shown. These riveting photographs, accompanied by the life stories that these young people in custody shared with Ross, give voice to imprisoned children from families that have no resources in communities that have no power.
Finally:
Approximately 70,000 young people are in detention or correctional facilities every day in the United States. 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.
So sad...