How we did it

Arkansas shields public access to juvenile court records and other information about what goes on in its youth prisons.

For this article and for others still in progress, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

reporter Amanda Claire Curcio spoke to more than a dozen once-incarcerated Arkansas teenagers and their parents. She also interviewed dozens of national and local youth justice experts, child welfare advocates, circuit judges, attorneys, and current and former state employees.

Social media and people working within the juvenile justice system helped Curcio find parents and children who wished to talk about their experiences with youth incarceration.

Curcio analyzed seven years of sentencing data from the Arkansas Division of Youth Services, and collected and reviewed hundreds of pages of law-enforcement records, court documents, inspections and audits pertaining to the state’s juvenile justice system and youth lockups.

The last names of children in this project have been excluded in order to protect their identities as minors.

Support for Curcio’s reporting on this project also came from the Fund for Journalism on Child Well-Being, a program of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.