“Criminal Justice Systems in Children’s Literature and Media”: A Children’s Literature Association Quarterly Special Issue
2020 marks 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 United States’ criminal justice system and its many devastating effects. Numerous studies have also documented the ways in which children and young adults are impacted by the criminal justice system, whether they are in it themselves, have a family member in it, or are living with the expectation of entering it in the future.