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The End of Juvenile Prison
The New Press
June 2014
On Sale: June 3, 2014
384 pages ISBN: 1595589562 EAN: 9781595589569 Kindle: B00IHGU23E Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are
typically benched. But when Will got into it on the court,
he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range by
a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four
hours, 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. 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. 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.
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