How was it possible, famed for its hardcore attitude toward crime and punishment, could be leading the way in the rehabilitation of violent and troubled youth? Now Hubner shares the surprising answers he found over months of unprecedented access to the Giddings State School, that a state like Texas, he wondered, home to “the worst of the worst”: four hundred teenage lawbreakers convicted of crimes ranging from aggravated assault to murder.

. The key moment comes when the young offenders reenact these soul-shattering moments with other group members in cathartic outpourings of suffering and anger that lead, incredibly, to genuine remorse and the beginnings of true empathy. It is a story of horror and heartbreak, yet ultimately full of hope. A powerful, bracing and deeply spiritual look at intensely, troubled youth, Last Chance in Texas gives a stirring account of the way one remarkable prison rehabilitates its inmates.

While reporting on the juvenile court system, journalist John Hubner kept hearing about a facility in Texas that ran the most aggressive–and one of the most successful–treatment programs for violent young offenders in America. Hubner follows two of these youths–a boy and a girl–through harrowing group therapy sessions in which they, along with their fellow inmates, recount their crimes and the abuse they suffered as children.

The first steps on the long road to redemption. Cutting through the political platitudes surrounding the controversial issue of juvenile justice, Hubner lays bare the complex ties between abuse and violence.

True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall

What he found so moved and astonished him that he began to teach there regularly. We see them coming to terms with their crime-ridden pasts and searching for a reason to believe in their future selves. In voices of indelible emotional presence, the boys write about what led them to crime and about the lives that stretch ahead of them behind bars.

Insightful, comic, honest and tragic, True Notebooks is an object lesson in the redemptive power of writing. In 1997 mark salzman, bestselling author Iron and Silk and Lying Awake, paid a reluctant visit to a writing class at L. A. S central juvenile hall, a lockup for violent teenage offenders, many of them charged with murder.

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My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King

This is a raw and powerful odyssey through the ranks of the new mafia, where the only people more dangerous than rival gangs are members of your own gang, who in one breath will say they’ll die for you and in the next will order your assassination. Looking for an escape from childhood abuse, Reymundo Sanchez turned away from school and baseball to drugs, alcohol, and then sex, and was left to fend for himself before age 14.

The latin kings, but its violence cost him friends, freedom, became his refuge and his world, self-respect, one of the largest and most notorious street gangs in America, and nearly his life.

Social Policy for Children and Families: A Risk and Resilience Perspective

Jenson and Mark W. Recipient of the best edited book award from the society for research on Adolescence in 2008, the book is an ideal core text for graduate and upper level undergraduate courses and a vital resource for elected officials, policy makers, and others interested in the evolution of policies aimed at preventing problem behaviors and supporting children and families.

In every chapter, experts in their respective fields apply the editors’ conceptual model across the substantive domains of child and family poverty, child welfare, developmental disabilities, substance use, education, health, mental health, and juvenile justice. Written in a conversational, reader-friendly style and incorporating cutting-edge research, this carefully crafted book maps a pathway for developing resilience-based social policies.

The third Edition of Jeffrey M. Fraser’s award-winning text, offers new evidence that a public health framework based on ecological theory and principles of risk, Social Policy for Children and Families, protection, and resilience is essential for the successful design and implementation of social policy.

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No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

Humes draws an alarming portrait of a judicial system in disarray. Yet he shows us there is also hope in the handful of courageous individuals working tirelessly to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds. Weaving together a poignant, compelling narrative with razor-sharp investigative reporting, profoundly disturbing discussion of the Los Angeles juvenile court’s failings, No Matter How Loud I Shout is a convincingly reported, providing terrifying evidence of the system’s inability to slow juvenile crime or to make even a reasonable stab at rehabilitating troubled young offenders.

Now updated with a new introduction and afterword, this award-winning examination of the nation’s largest juvenile criminal justice system in Los Angeles by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist is “an important book with a message of great urgency, especially to all concerned with the future of America’s children” Booklist.

In an age when violence and crime by young people is again on the rise, No Matter How Loud I Shout offers a rare look inside the juvenile court system that deals with these children and the impact decisions made in the courts had on the rest of their lives. Granted unprecedented access to the los angeles juvenile Court, the probation officers, including the judges, and the children themselves, Edward Humes creates an unforgettable portrait of a chaotic system that is neither saving our children in danger nor protecting us from adolescent violence.

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Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys New Perspectives in Crime, Deviance, and Law

Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men, who now face punitive policies in their schools, communities, and a world where they are constantly policed and stigmatized. Victor rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California in the 1980s and 90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing.

. Rios followed a group of forty delinquent Black and Latino boys for three years. Ultimately, he argues that by understanding the lives of the young men who are criminalized and pipelined through the criminal justice system, we can begin to develop empathic solutions which support these young men in their development and to eliminate the culture of punishment that has become an overbearing part of their everyday lives.

These boys found themselves in a vicious cycle, and disciplined at young ages, profiled, watched, caught in a spiral of punishment and incarceration as they were harassed, even before they had committed any crimes, eventually leading many of them to fulfill the destiny expected of them. But beyond a fatalistic account of these marginalized young men, Rios finds that the very system that criminalizes them and limits their opportunities, sparks resistance and a raised consciousness that motivates some to transform their lives and become productive citizens.

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Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice

It explores the broad appeal of this new vision and offers a brief history of its development. The book presents a theoretical foundation for the principles and values of restorative justice and develops its four cornerpost ideas of encounter, amends, inclusion and reintegration. Restoring justice: an introduction to Restorative Justice offers a clear and convincing explanation of restorative justice, a movement within criminal justice with growing worldwide influence.

. After exploring how restorative justice ideas and values may be integrated into policy and practice, it presents a series of key issues commonly raised about restorative justice, summarizing various perspectives on each.

Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison

She presents these youths all as fully realized people, not victims. As they describe in their own voices their fight to maintain their humanity and protect their individuality in environments that would deny both, these young people offer a hopeful alternative to the doomed effort to reform a system that should only be dismantled.

Burning down the house is a clarion call to shut down our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and bring our children home. But when will got into it on the court, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range by a chemical similar to Mace, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month.

One in three american children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about how to rehabilitate young offenders. In a clear-eyed indictment of the juvenile justice system run amok, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein shows that there is no right way to lock up a child.

When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. The very act of isolation denies delinquent children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults. Bernstein introduces us to youth across the nation who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state.

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The New Jim Crow

With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U. S. The new jim Crow is such a book. Criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. In the words of benjamin todd jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action. Called "stunning" by pulitzer prize–winning historian david levering lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, now with a foreword by Cornel West, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, is a must-read for all people of conscience.

Praised by harvard law professor lani guinier as "brave and bold, " this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness.

Mother to Mother Bluestreak Book 13

The result is not an apology for the murder, but a beautifully written exploration of the society that bred such violence. Sindiwe magona's novel mother to mother explores the South African legacy of apartheid through the lens of a woman who remembers a life marked by oppression and injustice. She then learned that one of the boys held responsible for the killing was in fact her neighbor's son.

Magona began to imagine how easily it might have been her own son caught up in the wave of violence that day. The murderer's mother, mandisi, and the colonized society that not only allowed, the life of her child, writes about her life, but perpetuated violence against women and impoverished black South Africans under the reign of apartheid.

Magona decided to write this novel when she discovered that Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl, who had been killed while working to organize the nation's first ever democratic elections in 1993, died just a few yards away from her own permanent residence in Guguletu, Capetown. The book is based on this real-life incident, and takes the form of an epistle to Amy Biehl's mother.

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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan stevenson may, indeed, be America’s Mandela. Nicholas kristof, the new york times “You don’t have to read too long to start cheering for this man. Bryan stevenson, the oppressed, the voiceless, the outcast, the vulnerable, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, however, and those with no hope.

A work of style, substance and clarity. The case drew bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

Winner of the carnegie medal for excellence in nonfiction • winner of the naacp image award for nonfiction • winner of a Books for a Better Life Award • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize • An American Library Association Notable Book“Every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so.

Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Jordan and jamie foxxnamed one of the best books of the year by the new york times • the washington post • the boston globe • the seattle Times • Esquire • Time Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system.

One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit.