Q&A: Brit Christopher and Gabriel Arika on why youth prisons don’t work — and how their youth-led magazine is building a movement

The No Kids in Prison magazine is a project of Youth First Justice Collaborative (YFJCo), a national organization dedicated to ending youth incarceration in the U.S. by fueling the movement of campaigns, youth leaders and organizers fighting for our future. Brit Christopher, 27, is the literary curatorial apprentice for the No Kids in Prison magazine and leads distribution in Philadelphia. Gabriel Arika, 22, is the youth programming lead at Legal Rights Center and curatorial apprentice for the No Kids in Prison magazine. He leads magazine distribution in Minneapolis. Both have personal knowledge of the justice system. I’ve had the honor of exchanging emails with them over several months and, together, we shaped this into a Q&A format.​​​

Q: Our readers are familiar with the school-to-prison pipeline. Give us a quick overview of the facts they might not know.

Brit Christopher: Every day, in communities across the U.S., tens of thousands of young people are locked up in facilities that fail to meet their basic needs. Youth prisons have well-documented problems, including understaffing, regulatory failures, and abuse and neglect of young people in their care. Only 8.5% of youth arrests in 2024 were for violent crimes. Youth prisons fail young people: Incarceration causes harm and keeps kids ensnared in a complicated web of systems that prevents them from healing, disrupts their education and fractures critical bonds with their families, loved ones and communities.

In many cases, youth in detention haven’t been convicted of a crime at all.

They are held in prison-like facilities while awaiting a court date, a foster home placement or an available bed in a mental health facility. They can also be locked up for “status offenses,” such as skipping school, running away from home and violating curfew — which wouldn’t be considered crimes if they were adults.

The data shows youth incarceration exposes young people to physical and sexual abuse, negatively affects their emotional well-being and mental health, and hinders their education and employment success — all while failing to reduce recidivism, keep communities safe or prevent crime.

Q: Talk about the work the Youth First Justice Collaborative does with and for young people to shine a spotlight on these hidden harms.

Gabriel Arika: Young people are our future. Today’s youth are smart, resilient, passionate and willing to put in the work to change the future. But they need investment — in their leadership, in their communities, in opportunities to grow — whether that be through school, work or sports.

Working with YFJCo, we are centering young people’s voices, hearing their perspectives, what drives them, what they fear and what keeps them safe and thriving. We want to repair the harm caused by youth incarceration.

Everyone can learn so much and find so many similarities in their own experience if they listen to youth.

YFJCo is working to end youth incarceration because we know that young people deserve better than incarceration. We need community-based diversion programs, better and effective mentorship, credible messengers, third spaces, educational spaces and like-interest spaces. These programs are more effective than incarceration because they strengthen the social, educational and developmental supports that reduce risk, promote healthy identity formation and create pathways to success.

Those are outcomes that prison cannot produce. Surrounding young people with guidance, structure and opportunity instead of punishment, isolation and stigma helps them grow into who they can become, rather than trapping them in who they were.

Q: Where did the idea of collecting and curating youth stories into a print format come from?

Brit Christopher: We wanted to create a magazine that tells a real story about what is happening to young people, what we stand for and what changes we are working to make. We wanted it to be something people could hold in their hand, having conversations in real time with the people in their communities.

In the magazine, we’re sharing stories, art and analysis from formerly and currently incarcerated youth about their experiences, their hopes for the future and the solutions they propose for divesting from youth prisons and reallocating funding to community-based programs. We also wanted to raise awareness about how youth incarceration affects families, schools and neighborhoods.

We released the magazine in May after nearly two years of planning, curation and design. In August 2025, we started soliciting and receiving submissions from currently and formerly incarcerated young people. We collected more than 100 drawings, essays, poems and other creative pieces from across the country. It was an honor to read and review their submissions, knowing that young people directly affected by incarceration had poured their souls onto these pages.

Q: I’m curious — in this digital age, where content is measured in seconds and everything is online, why did you opt for a print format?

Gabriel Arika: People need to hold the weight of youth incarceration in their hands to feel the impact. Having the print magazine in hand allowed us to start and sustain hard conversations.

I view the magazine as a collectible trophy for the young people whose artistry, writing, vision and ideas are on display. It’s more than layers of paper — it’s a symbol of resistance and freedom. Flipping through 64 pages of stories, poems and images, I really related to so many of the experiences the contributors shared.

The magazine is a platform for young people to showcase their work on a larger scale.

It was important for me to let the world see the great talents of directly impacted young people and how their futures hold unlimited promise.

The print format also allows us to get the magazine into youth detention facilities — which was really important for us — to honor the contributions of the many incarcerated youth who shared their art, writing and experiences.

Q: How is the magazine being distributed?

Brit Christopher: We leverage our local partners and networks. Youth-led teams in and around Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Wichita, New Orleans and Oakland distributed 2,000 print copies of the magazine in communities heavily affected by youth incarceration. We’ve also gotten copies into community spaces in New York City, New Haven and Providence. Most recently, as Gabriel mentioned, we sent copies of the magazine to youth detention facilities in New York, Connecticut and Arizona, giving incarcerated young people a window into our movement and the assurance that they’re not alone.

Isolation and loneliness are some of the hardest parts of incarceration for young people to endure.

We hope the magazine can remind them they haven’t been forgotten.

Q: Can you share a few examples from the exhibit — story titles, a quote, a visual?

Q: What’s next on the horizon?

Brit Christopher: As we get copies out into communities, we’re having so many powerful conversations with our neighbors, community leaders, fellow youth organizers and community groups — conversations that are helping us challenge stereotypes, reclaim narratives about youth and tell the story of youth incarceration’s impact and what we can all do about it. So we decided to create an online guide. The digital version of the magazine is in production, and we’re working with a Philadelphia teacher to create an educators’ toolkit to help bring these conversations into schools and more traditional youth programs. The online supports for the magazine will be available in early 2027, in time for use during the 2026-27 school year.

Q: What can readers who want to start these conversations sooner in their organizations and communities do now while they’re waiting?

Gabriel Arika: You can request a copy by reaching out to magazine@nokidsinprison.org. You can also visit our website and check out our State Partners page to link up with an organization near you. And we can always use donations to help us produce more copies and distribute the magazine in more communities across the country.

Q: What final words do you want to share?

Gabriel Arika: Youth are the experts of our own experience. We deserve a chance to be heard about how to dismantle systems of punishment and control and transition instead to systems of care and support. The magazine is one way we’re starting those conversations in our own neighborhoods and in communities across the country.

Brit Christopher: From planning, curation, design and distribution, the magazine has brought art, advocacy, lived experience and community power building together in a thought-provoking and inspiring way. It’s a conversation starter and a piece of art, an organizing tool and an anthology of resilience.

We’re proud of the magazine, the young people who contributed to it and the strength, creativity and resilience of the youth justice movement — building a world where all kids are safe and free.