Perpetrating justice: Representations of the legal system in children's and young adult literature

Children's books about the legal system have been published in America and England since Victorian times, but, throughout the last two decades, the criminal justice system gained a larger and more visible presence in children's literature, both in works that uphold the integrity of legal practices and in works that critique the system. Representations of the legal system are offered to child readers of all ages through picture books, middle grade novels, and young adult fiction and through a variety of genres, including realistic fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy. Though these works focus on different aspects of the legal system, like incarcerated parents, prisons, juvenile delinquency, and trials, they usually place greater emphasis on individuals within the system rather than on the system itself, ultimately upholding the status quo of the legal system. This resistance to advocating for institutional changes can be seen as conservative, but the books' willingness to address sensitive subjects, like prisons and crime, is also progressive, so these books as a whole cannot be uniformly categorized as conservative or liberal.;The books can, however, be read as examples of multicultural children's literature because they provide representations of a distinct group of people who are frequently feared, ignored, or dismissed by society. Yet while individuals whose lives are closely affected by the criminal justice system constitute a specific group that shares a common culture, these individuals also come from a variety of other distinct cultural groups, which influence the different experiences that they have within the legal culture, as well as the rejection that they may receive from society. These other cultural memberships, like gender, race, and class, may also not always be fully portrayed, as these books struggle to find a balance between accurately representing the incarcerated population and avoiding harmful stereotypes about criminals.;By examining these books as examples of multicultural literature and as an important subset of children's literature that does not receive much scholarly attention, Perpetrating Justice strives to give a balanced view of the trials and tribulations associated with representing the legal system in works for, about, and read by children.