Swanson -- Will Youth Prisons Be Found Only in History Books?
Will Youth Prisons Be Found Only in History Books? Leave a Comment / April 15, 2026 By David Swanson, Progressive Hub , April 15, 2026 Nell Bernstein’s new book is called In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison . It tells us that in the United States in 2000 the number of young people held inside locked buildings was 108,800 and in 2022 it was 27,600. At least two-thirds of youth prisons and jails have been shut down. This is an enormous, dramatic, positive development in an era when most people imagine that the closest thing to good news out there is a stretch of 8 hours without any social media posts from Trump. Bernstein also tells us that even now the United States still has the highest rate of youth incarceration on the planet. This fact helps to convey some sense of how extremely out of sync with the rest of the world the United States was in 2000. As with militarism, gun distribution, environmental destruction, adult incarceration, ...