FREE poster downloads, videos, art activities and tools designed for supporting abolitionist conversations and taking creative action!
Now is the time to act to end youth incarceration. Creative visioning shifts culture in ways that are key to political wins like ending youth incarceration. You can start today!
Scroll down to access tools we’ve created to help you engage more deeply in the #NoKidsinPrison digital experience.
Posters! Download! Share! Create Your Own!
Transmissions from the Future is a collaboration that weaves together the futurist visions of youth organizers from around the country, art from six years of Performing Statistics programming and the brilliance of five visionary artists.
The Process
Performing Statistics team members Mark Strandquist, Gina Lyles and Kate DeCiccio designed a storytelling structure that led youth organizers from around the country to teleport to 2050. Imagining from a place where they had the wisdom of elders who created a world where intergenerational trauma had healed and youth incarceration was a fossil in time, youth organizers had conversations articulating their visions of inner peace and the chance to grow into their full potential. Young people in Virginia, New Jersey, California, Maine, and Kansas contributed to these transcriptions from the future.
Next, we commissioned six incredible visual artists to work using the content collected from our conversations along with our archive of creative work by young people in our programs since 2014 as inspiration to create ‘an artifact from the future.’ Always we thought about this art as though it was reporting back from a world punctuated by liberation and possibility, a blueprint to reach toward.
We wanted to propose, what becomes possible when no kids are in prison!
Click on each poster for download!
Create your own Transmission from the Future!
Engaging your students in conversations about transcending youth incarceration?
Imagining a world beyond youth prisons?
We designed a unit using the Transmissions from the Future project as inspiration. The simple curriculum includes three activities for your students to create their own collage or photographic poster that imagines a future world where all youth are free. We encourage you to use this curriculum as a companion to the digital experience. Lean into conversations about mapping a world without youth incarceration. Engage your classroom in conversations about what true safety and supportive community looks like. Let imagination guide students to express their thoughts, feelings and dreams! Click below to download the curriculum.
Watch and share the Abolitionist FAQ Video Series!
The #NoKidsinPrison digital experience could only scratch the surface on many of the issues. We often hear the same questions when we challenge our community to imagine and build a world without youth prisons, so we created the Abolitionist FAQ video series as a way to dispel some common myths and outline in more detail a world where all youth are free. This is a multi-part series, so keep an eye out for new videos throughout this year. This series was developed in collaboration with the Columbia Justice Lab.
Share the experience or host your own event!
We’re standing at the edge of the end of youth incarceration. The number of young people in prisons continues to decline. The majority of Americans want kids out of cells. With a groundswell of calls to redirect money away from the carceral system and into communities, we have the opportunity to end youth incarceration in this generation.
Imagine if youth across our country felt safer, loved, supported and rooted in their communities.
By using this “How To” guide, you are part of the solution!
Thank you for taking action to help end youth incarceration.
If each of us commit to one of the action steps below, it’d me a major step toward closing all youth prisons….let alone if you come up with more unique ways to use the #NoKidsinPrison digital experience.
The 5 five suggestions to use this web experience offer a handful of ideas and templates to make your post, conversation, meeting or event as easy as possible.
If you have other brilliant ideas you’d like to discuss, please! send us a direct message.
We’d love to hear from you!
*Performing Statistics team
Share on social media
Share the #NoKidsinPrison digital experience on social media. You may have noticed the Facebook and Twitter icons while going through the experience. If not, just look in the upper right hand corner.
Post some of the gorgeous art from the Educator Resource section!
Or, use the suggested social media posts below!
Facebook:
The fact is; youth prisons don’t work. How do we create a future without them?
Go to the: @NoKidsInPrison experience, an interactive platform from @PerformingStatistics that uses data, storytelling, and art created by youth impacted by the justice system to educate people to understand the issues and imagine a different future and take action for youth across the country.
Twitter Youth prisons are outdated, ineffective & costly. It’s time to #FreeOurYouth and dismantle the system that clearly doesn’t work! Learn how at nokidsinprison.org/experience
Start a conversation!
Invite your friends, colleagues, and coworkers to view the site and have a discussion! Here are ways to consider getting started:
Organize a professional development or team-building opportunity at your workplace
Send the experience to 5 friends and go to lunch to talk about it
Bring this up at your next monthly family Zoom call
Ask to lead a conversation at your next staff meeting. Print the posters and share them.
Introduce the experience at your next grassroots organizing meeting
Sometimes an experience like the #NoKidsinPrison digital experience can leave us speechless. We don’t know the right words to say or questions to ask. Here are a few options to get started. Add your own!
What section, story, or artwork did you most connect with? Surprised you the most? Challenged you the most?
What are some common themes you heard throughout the experience?
What did you learn from the experience that you didn’t know before?
How did the experience make you feel?
How can you turn that feeling into action?
What does a world without youth prisons look like to you?
What are the policies, practices, and procedures where you live, local or statewide, for youth who are caught in the school-to-prison pipeline? How can you engage schools you’re connected to, to be agents of interrupting the STPP?
What are the solutions young people with expert perspectives are recommending?
How you can take action today to support the movement to close youth prisons?
Engage your community
Engage your community to transform the youth justice system! Use the #NoKidsInPrison digital experience to bring people together, learn about the impact of youth incarceration and create a new vision for the future.
Here are ways to get started:
Ask for 5-10 minutes to show the #NKIP digital experience at upcoming meetings. Share 1 of the Abolitionist FAQ videos each week over a month.
Ask your local library to host a display where people can explore. Volunteer times when you can be there to guide the experience.
Host a table at any upcoming community events to showcase the site & share the posters.
Partner with educators to support them to include site materials and activities as part of curriculum. Volunteer to support them make their own posters using the art activities on the site.
Hold an abolitionist art challenge with your friends and create your own Transmissions from the Future. Check out the art activities. Wheat paste your art around your city and hold your elected leaders accountable to keeping young people in your community free!
Take action
Organize a virtual “Day of Action”! Share the #NoKidsInPrison experience and encourage your friends to sign the national petition calling on the Biden administration to make good on their campaign pledge to invest $100 million to close & repurpose youth prisons!
Educate your federal, state, and local officials
Educate your federal, state, and local officials (and their staff!) on why youth prisons need to close and funds need to be redirected to support youth in their communities.
Ask for a meeting and take 10 minutes to share the #NoKidsInPrison experience (be sure to bring a device you can show it on!) They may not have time to see the whole website, but share the sections most important to you! Encourage them to explore on their own!
Print the posters and post them in places where elected officials will see them. Take up space creating art that shows your elected leaders what a world without youth prisons looks like & call them to be part of creating it.
Have ideas you’d like to talk with us about? Use the form below to send us a message. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
