No Kids in Prison: Visualizing an End to Youth Incarceration

When the Youth First Initiative wanted a new, interactive website to help educate and inspire more people to get involved in their national campaign to end youth incarceration, they turned to Balestra Media to help plan, design and develop NoKidsinPrison.org

This was one of Balestra Media’s largest website projects to date, with planning, development and design work spanning more than a year. Our main goal was to create a visually-rich website that showcased the organization’s short documentaries about youth incarceration and redesign an interactive map with deep data sets to enable sophisticated social media sharing capabilities. 

The main features of No Kids in Prison include:

  • An opportunity to watch short films about why prisons are no place for kids and how community alternatives succeed

  • New ways to explore and share interactive maps that show where youth are locked up, how much youth incarceration is costing our communities, and the racial and ethnic disparities among youth who are incarcerated

 
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  • A visually-arresting presentation of the dysfunctional and racially disparate youth incarceration complex in the US

 
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  • More resources that point to solutions and strategies to ensure youth are able to access services, programs, and opportunities in their communities

 
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  • Ways people can take action, by joining and supporting active, youth-led campaigns, to end youth incarceration and invest in youth and their communities

Closing youth prisons requires that more people understand the deplorable conditions that incarcerated youth are subjected to, the shocking racial disparities within the juvenile justice system, and that better ways of investing in the potential of our young people exist and work. We are proud to have completed this project to support the campaigns that can now harness the power of an even greater number of people to share resources, support the closure of these facilities and join youth demanding community alternatives to incarceration across the country.