This is where the Sing Sing Prison Museum community, authors, scholars, and book lovers can find reading recommendations, thought-provoking discussion questions, and access to conversations with authors and journalists about the deep-reaching ecosystem of the criminal justice system. This will be an opportunity for readers to expand their knowledge of the criminal justice system through works of fiction, nonfiction, and other mediums. SSPM will showcase a plethora of voices and perspectives to unlock the past and open minds.
Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration by Jerry FloresFrom home, to school, to juvenile detention center, and back again. Follow the lives of fifty Latina girls living forty miles outside of Los Angeles, California, as they are inadvertently caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. Their experiences in the connected programs between “El Valle” Juvenile Detention Center and “Legacy” Community School reveal the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. The girls participate in well-intentioned wraparound services designed to provide them with support at home, at school, and in the detention center. But these services may more closely resemble the phenomenon of wraparound incarceration, in which students, despite leaving the actual detention center, cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention, and are thereby slowly pushed away from traditional schooling and a productive life course.
The Nickel Boys by Colson WhiteheadIn this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Colson Whitehead writes the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. When Elwood Curtis, a Black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative.
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