The cover of photographer Richard Ross’ 2012 book Juvenile in Justice showed a young black boy, back to the camera, clad in a correctional uniform whose loose fit and stenciled block lettering underscored his youth, his small frame, his vulnerability. It’s an image at once horrifying and devastating.
It’s made even more so when you place it in context of the countless studies outlining the grotesquely disparate ways black and brown children are treated by the authorities (police, judges, the legal system as a whole) compared to their white counterparts – the harsher sentences, more brutal policing. And then there are the studies that underline the ways black children are not even seen as children at all, not only in the eyes of the legal system, but in media depictions of them and in the perceptions of non-blacks.
Ross’s latest book, Girls in Justice, provides an unvarnished look at experiences of girls and young women caught up in the legal system. The rates at which girls are incarcerated are astonishingly high and growing, even as figures for males are heading downward.
The photos in the book are humanizing but often harrowing, and the text is maybe even more so. Physical and sexual violence peppers the stories the girls/young women tell of their lives. Drug use by them and those around them, poverty that’s created generations-deep cycles of struggle, overwhelming emotional and psychological damage as a result of how they are forced to live – it all comes forth in the narrative text that accompanies the images, including a preface by Marian Wright Edelman and essays by Leslie Acoca, Dr. Karen Countryman-Roswurm, and Mariame Kaba, Maisha T. Winn.
In a recent interview with Slate, Ross’ creative process is described as follows:
In his photos, Ross either blurs out the faces of his subjects or frames them so that they’re obscured. He does it, he said, because he doesn’t want them to be followed throughout their lives by evidence of their time in detention. But it also serves an artistic purpose—one that he hopes will impact viewers of his work.
“If you see a face, you can say, ‘Well, I’m glad that’s not my kid,’ ” he said. “But if the face is obscured, it could stand in for anybody’s kid.”
A powerful companion to Ross’ book is the 2003 documentary Girlhood, directed by Liz Garbus, whose forthcoming documentary on Nina Simone has already been the object of rapturous buzz.
