By the time I was 7 years old I knew drugs were bad. I didn’t need a parent to sit me down on their knee and tell me this because Saturday morning cartoons were frequently interrupted by an advertisement brought to me by Partnership for a Drug-Free America in which an 18-year-old Rachael Leigh Cook smashed an egg, and then her entire kitchen, and told me this was so.
I didn’t know this mid-90s commercial was a revamp of an even more famous 1987 advertisement featuring a white, male authority figure and that same sinister egg. I didn’t know about the war on drugs, but I knew that Cook had the haircut I wanted. I couldn’t have known from this advertisement that kids not too much older than myself, swept up in the hysterical rhetoric of an inner-city epidemic of drugs and violence, were being locked up in droves, and that increasingly, these were children of color. The advertisement said drugs crack kids’ brains on stovetops; the other, silent reality was that the war on drugs cracked kids’ brains in solitary.
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That’s still the reality today. In the United States, it tends to be the case that the real wars we’re fighting are behind walls. The war on children has been one of those, and is, perhaps, the country’s greatest shame.
According to Nell Bernstein’s new book, Burning Down the House, there are currently 66,332 young people confined in juvenile facilities, two-thirds of them in long-term placement. Her impressive and immersive new book focuses on the criminalization of American young people, from the mid-80s when the trend first exploded to the present day when the United States incarcerates more of its kids than any other industrialized nation.