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For the Children argues that the child is a critical figure to the understanding of the struggle to dismantle America’s prison nation. The child--and all producing institutions including schools, families, and juvenile justice systems--is a key technology of a shifting carceral regime. New forms of surveillance are invented to safeguard children, and new categories of crimes are required to mold the child into an appropriate adult. Childhood has historically never been available to all. Yet in the work to challenge or dismantle this carceral apparatus all too often naturalizes and invokes the very artifacts and technologies--the child--that reproduces and expands the logics at the core of the prison nation. As the nation begins to engage in rethinking facets of our prison nation, the child represents a significant and intimate thread, one that anti-prison organizers, prisons, and educational studies scholars must examine.

“If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another in the Siberian frost.” The Siberian taiga: a massive forest region of roughly 4.5 million square miles, stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, breathtakingly beautiful and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Winter temperatures plummet to a bitter 97 degrees below zero, and beneath the permafrost lie the fossilized remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age giants. For the Yukaghir, an indigenous people of the taiga, hunting sable is both an economic necessity and a spiritual experience—where trusting dreams and omens is as necessary as following animal tracks. Since the fall of Communism, a corrupt regional corporation has monopolized the fur trade, forcing the Yukaghir hunters into impoverished servitude. This book presents an extraordinary, chilling tale of one year living in exile among Yukaghir hunters in the stark Siberian taiga region. At turns shocking and quietly moving, the book is a story of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a portrait of the Yukaghirs’ shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life, a drama unfolding daily in one of the world’s coldest, most enthralling landscapes.