I’m grateful for a powerful new book, Girls In Justice by artist Richard Ross, a follow up to his moving earlier Juvenile In Justice, which combines Ross’s photographs of girls in the juvenile justice system with interviews he gathered from more than 250 detention facilities across the United States. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the deeply disturbing photographs speak volumes. Ross uses the power of photography to make visible the hidden and harsh world of girls in detention. These heart wrenching images coupled with the girls’ ages and life stories should move us to confront the cruel and unjust juvenile justice system in our nation.These girls are ours: our neighbors, our children’s classmates, our daughters and granddaughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces — and, for some young children, our mothers. Girls In Justice begs the questions: Why are so many girls, especially girls of color, confined in our nation’s detention facilities? And what are we as a society going to do about it?
We must all work tirelessly to give hope and a fair chance to these girls and all children by promoting policies, programs, and supports that help them and their families, especially those most at risk. We must combat systemic problems that contribute to family and community dysfunction and wreak havoc on developing children including girls; we must dig beneath the surface and examine the root cause of girls’ “offenses” and why injustice saps the hopes of so many young lives on our watch.
[For more of this story, written by Marian Wright Edelman, go to http://newpittsburghcourieronl...ch-girls-in-justice/]
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