Interrogating Incarceration: Listening Beyond the Statistics

Lucy Stein first encountered incarceration through stories.

Not through legislation or campaign slogans, but through books that traced the lives of people moving through the prison system — especially Black women and marginalized communities whose experiences are often pushed to the edges of public conversation. The stories stayed with her. So did the question underneath them: what happens long before someone ever enters a prison cell?

Lucy Stein, she/her

Friends Seminary & student in NYAC who created the project “Interrogating Incarceration.”

Now a junior at Friends Seminary in New York City, Lucy spends much of her time in spaces built around argument and analysis. She competes in debate and mock trial, mentors younger students in Model Congress, and has developed a growing interest in criminal justice reform and advocacy. But Interrogating Incarceration, her project through the National Youth Advocacy Corps (NYAC), moves beyond debate alone. The project sits closer to listening.

Built through a community participatory research framework, Interrogating Incarceration examines the histories, stereotypes, and institutional conditions that contribute to disproportionate discipline in schools and the continued expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. Through an intersectional lens, the project centers Black women and girls whose experiences with criminalization, surveillance, and systemic inequity are frequently absent from broader public narratives around incarceration.

The work unfolds through a podcast.

Conversations stretch across experiences of racialized school discipline, incarceration, reproductive justice, voting rights, LGBTQ+ exclusion in educational systems, and the realities facing children of incarcerated parents. Legal experts, advocates, researchers, and students enter the project not as abstract sources, but as people carrying different relationships to policy, systems, and survival.

April Preyar

Criminal defense attorney & interviewee

In one interview, criminal defense attorney April Preyar speaks from more than two decades inside courtrooms and legal education spaces. In another, students and advocates reflect on race, gender, identity, and the ways institutions shape who is protected, punished, or ignored. Across the project, research and lived experience remain in constant conversation with one another.

The format leaves room for texture that statistics alone cannot hold.

A pause before answering.

A shift in someone’s voice.

The way one system quietly bleeds into another.

Around Lucy’s project is the structure of NYAC itself: a year-long fellowship bringing together young people ages 15 to 25 to investigate urgent social justice issues through research, interdisciplinary collaboration, advocacy history, and public policy. Fellows work alongside faculty mentors, researchers, organizers, and peers while developing projects rooted in both inquiry and action.

Through partnerships with Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, and National Center for Civil and Human Rights, fellows move through archives, workshops, coaching sessions, policy conversations, and cross-generational learning spaces designed to sharpen both analysis and practice.

At the 2025 IGNYTE Symposium, fellows spent four days in workshops and collaborative sessions exploring advocacy, history, research, and systems change. Survey reflections collected afterward described young people building confidence, finding intellectual community, and developing new language for understanding the systems surrounding them.

Lucy’s project carries many of those same threads.

Questions become research.

Research becomes conversation.

Conversation becomes something public-facing and difficult to ignore.

The school-to-prison pipeline is often discussed through numbers: suspension rates, incarceration statistics, policy reports. Interrogating Incarceration moves alongside those realities while staying attentive to the people living inside them — particularly Black girls and women whose experiences are frequently flattened, erased, or treated as secondary within broader conversations about criminal justice reform.

The project does not arrive at easy conclusions. Instead, it lingers inside complexity: how schools mirror larger systems of punishment, how race and gender shape discipline differently, how advocacy requires both historical memory and policy imagination, how public narratives decide whose pain becomes visible.

Across NYAC, fellows are encouraged to pursue those kinds of questions with seriousness. They are introduced to archival research, policy analysis, mentorship, collaborative inquiry, and community-centered approaches to advocacy. Projects emerge across disciplines and mediums: research initiatives, public scholarship, storytelling projects, wearable archives, health advocacy campaigns.

Together, they form a growing body of youth-led work grounded not in abstraction, but in sustained engagement with the world as it currently exists.

And sometimes that engagement begins quietly.

A student reading a book.

A question that refuses to leave.

A conversation carried far enough that other people begin listening too.

To learn more about Lucy Stein’s Interrogating Incarceration project and the National Youth Advocacy Corps, visit the project page and explore the work NYAC fellows are building across the country.