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Explaining the profound effect navigating the prison system has had on my life goes beyond the scope of this article, but it is for both scholarly and personal reasons that I examine this topic. Like many white people in the United States, incarceration was something I didn't consider because I didn't have to, until it became a part of my life. I'm a white woman who was raised in a privileged, middle class, suburban area in the Midwest. I never knew anyone who had gone to jail or to prison, and the closest I had ever been to a jail or prison myself was my TV screen. That changed in my late 20s. After developing an addiction to opioids and later heroin, one of my closest friends began stealing to support his drug habit. He was eventually arrested on grand larceny charges and sentenced to three years in prison. We talked almost every day for the next two years and eight months. I visited him monthly in jail and the two state prisons in which he was confined. I met, spoke with, and facilitated phone calls with and for other loved ones of men who were incarcerated with my friend. The experience of my friend's incarceration is one that profoundly shaped the ways I think about equity, justice, the carceral system, and activism. It was one of the earliest experiences I can remember in confronting my own privilege and being so angry at my own ignorance of something that affected so many.
I read Walter Dean Myers's Monster several years after my friend's release and was struck by the scenes that felt exactly like the things I had encountered and the nuance and details only someone with experience of the US carceral system would know. White folks "tend to think of the prison as disconnected from [their] own lives," but for Black and Brown youth, the reality of the US carceral system and its effects on Black and Brown communities are something they encounter regularly (Davis 16). Including the following novels in schools, libraries, youth centers, and detention centers would bring attention to and affirm the experiences of incarcerated youth, formerly incarcerated youth, and youth with loved ones who are or have been incarcerated.
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