In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison

by Nell Bernstein

A master class in social change—how a coalition of parents, activists, and prison officials brought a racist and destructive institution to its knees



Over the past twenty years, one state after another has shuttered its youth prisons and stopped trying 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 sequel to her 2014 award-winning book Burning Down the House, journalist Nell Bernstein dissects the forces that converged to move us from a moral panic about “juvenile superpredators” to a time in which the youth prison is rapidly fading from view.



In Our Future, We Are Free begins and ends with the imprisoned youth who took a leading role in their own liberation. Through vivid profiles, Bernstein chronicles the tireless work of mothers, activists, litigators, researchers, and journalists to expose and challenge the racist brutality of youth prisons—as well as the surprising story of prison officials who worked from the inside to close their institutions for good. The descriptions of how communities are pursuing safety, rehabilitation, and accountability outside of locked institutions offers a model for how we might overcome our addiction to incarceration writ large.



In Our Future, We Are Free is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how large-scale social change happens.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published November 11, 2025

About the author

Nell Bernstein is the author of All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated, a Newsweek “Book of the Week,” and Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison (both published by The New Press). She is a former Soros Justice Media Fellow and a winner of a White House Champion of Change award. Her articles have appeared in Newsday, Salon, Mother Jones, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She lives in Albany, California.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very interesting and readable, and I hadn't been aware of this movement at all or its successes, so I liked reading something positive. It was mainly written as a series of stories about different people or organizations in different states, so at times it seemed to run together. I wish the author had done more to tie together the patterns or lessons she saw in the different actions.