What if we trusted adjudicated youth to tell their own stories, and imagine their own version of justice? This is the question behind a yearlong collaborative curriculum—developed with the Juvenile Justice Services Center and Mark Strandquist of Richmond’s Performing Statistics project—that brought our teaching artists into six sites serving adjudicated young people across Philadelphia.

Student artwork brought numbers to life, humanizing the experience behind the school-to-prison pipeline in audio recordings, a collaborative publication, and an innovative digital library of protest artwork, with a culminating performance at City Hall on June 12, 2018. Imagining Justice brought the voices of youth touched by the criminal justice system into the public realm, where policymakers can hear these critical narratives.