The client
A national network of campaigns committed to ending youth incarceration by dismantling the youth prison model, shutting down youth facilities, and reallocating resources.
Why it matters
In the United States, as many as 25,000 children are locked up in detention centers, youth training facilities, and prisons. This system is expensive—costing millions in taxpayer dollars— and has been shown to lead to higher rates of re-arrest, abuse, and racial discrimination.
Youth First Justice Collaborative, working under its banner vision ‘No Kids in Prison,’ supports campaigns working all over the country to replace youth carceral facilities and replace them with alternatives like job training, mental health support, mentorship programs, and more.
The challenge
The original No Kids in Prison site was huge. It was full of valuable maps, data, and articles about the harms of youth incarceration and the benefits of investing in alternatives, but all of that information made it difficult to manage and use.
The site has two goals: To describe the function of Youth First Justice Collaborative—who they are, how they work, and who they support—and to garner more support for its mission by educating visitors about the harms of and alternatives to youth incarceration.
Colors & Collage
Youth First supports ‘the next generation of organizers and abolitionists.’ We wanted to make sure the site reflects its young audience.
The visual identity evolves some of the organization’s existing brand. We infused the site with collage-style visual elements, namely in page headers, where “ripped up” black and white imagery with grainy textures are pieced together with colors to provide a backdrop for black and white imagery of abolitionists and organizers. We utilized a striking magenta, green, and black color scheme.
The No Kids in Prison logo can be seen in various places throughout the site, including in an animated transition as visitors move between pages, adding to the DIY effect.
Learning opportunities
The No Kids in Prison site instead features ‘curiosity points’—inroads that encourage people to dive further into learning about youth incarceration and its alternatives.
These curiosity points took the form of story cards featuring short videos, quotes, facts, and stats about youth incarceration or its alternatives sprinkled around the website. Story cards link out to fuller resources, and can be modified to suit the Youth First team’s visual identity with pre-defined textures and layered imagery.
Transformative messaging
We provided narrative strategy and copywriting for the new site. Content on the ‘State of the System’ page draws on reports, interviews, and other resources to describe the failings of the youth carceral system in terms of cost, harm to kids, and inefficacy. The ‘Our Vision’ page shows how these failings can be—and are—remedied by targeted re-investment.
Copy on these pages and throughout the site brings in statistics, facts, direct quotes from the No Kids in Prison Manifesto, and the first-hand experiences of those who have been impacted by youth incarceration. The No Kids in Prison Abolition Glossary offers visitors new to the movement simple definitions of insider terminology such as ‘Continuum of Care’ and ‘Credible Messengers.’
Our messaging strategy relied on the principle of ‘transformation, not reformation.’ A broken system requires large-scale, innovative thinking, not minor re-adjustments. Strong, definitive sentences beginning with ‘We can’ and ‘We are’ moves away from the dreaminess of ‘We believe’ or ‘We should’ and emphasizes that we aren’t just capable of building a world where no youth are incarcerated; we’re already doing it.
Annual Report
We also worked with Youth First Justice Collaborative to create its 2024-2025 Impact Report, a print publication to be shared with the organization’s network, including funders, supporters, and network partners.
We designed a report that is polished and aligned with the Youth First Justice Collaborative brand while bringing in hints of the bold, collage-style visuals present on the new No Kids in Prison site. We also edited and wrote copy for the report, streamlining the writing styles of multiple stakeholders into a cohesive organizational voice.
Finally, we created a home for report’s highlights on the new No Kids in Prison website.
