Hi Friends,

Over the past twenty years, one state after another has shuttered its youth prisons and stopped prosecuting kids as adults, slashing the number of children locked in cages by a stunning 75 percent. How did this remarkable change come about? In the follow-up to her 2014 award-winning book Burning Down the House, journalist Nell Bernstein offers an eye-opening and inspiring look at the forces that converged to move us from a moral panic about “juvenile superpredators” in the 1990s to a time in which the youth prison is rapidly fading from view.

Join us for the July 2026 online book club on July 1 at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET with Nell Bernstein, author of In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison.

The event is free. Please come and ask questions!

Find future book clubs at https://teachinnetwork.org/bookclubs

Massachusetts has banned sentences of life in prison without any possibility of parole for people under age 21. Michigan and Washington have eliminated making such sentences mandatory. What has your state done?

If you live in the other 47 states, click here to email your state legislators and governor!

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Thanks for all you do!

In Solidarity,
The RootsAction Team

RootsAction.org