Chura, Mr. C. to his students, spent 10 years teaching students being held in adult jails for crimes ranging from drug sales to assault. He saw many of his students come and go and return again to the facility as they struggled with lives of poverty and crime. Some students flourished behind bars in a place that, despite its regimentation and inanity, was safer than their home environments. He recalls the raw, gritty emotions of young men with little education and few options, exercising sometimes violent and childish outlets for all that wild, pent-up adolescent energy. Among his students: Wade, a young man he’d met years before, still showing stacks of loving photos of his mother’s slow deterioration into drug addiction and AIDS, and Kahlil, starved for attention and struggling with nightmarish paranoia. Chura describes them as children of profound disappointment—in parents, communities, schools—overseen by adults who were likewise disappointed and are unnecessarily cruel and officious. Chura offers a compelling personal look at the failings of the juvenile justice system. --Vanessa Bush
Review
Powerful . . . I hope some of the leaders of the Obama administration will pay attention to these gripping stories and will wake our country up before it is too late.—Jonathan Kozol, author of
Savage Inequalities"David Chura's timely book ought to destroy our complacency. It takes us inside the locked-down world of neglected and abused youth who've been cast away into adult jails and reveals, through its succession of haunting vignettes and surprising turns, a truth that ought to shame us: when youth fail, it is most often because we adults have failed them again and again."—David Kaczynski, executive director, New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty
"A painfully honest window into the hearts and minds of youth who are incarcerated and the 'keepers' who are responsible for their safety and security. David Chura has crafted a terrific book: it's at once riveting and enriching, and by its end, you'll insist upon a more humane and effective approach to young offenders.—Sunny Schwartz, author of
Dreams from the Monster Factory"In thick and unvarnished descriptions, David Chura takes us into the growing gulag of American youth prisons and shows us the fractured faces and bruised spirits of children who seem almost condemned to destruction by the structural ecology of class and race and ancestry. These young people-hurt and hardened-have become the icons of our times, and they cry out for Divine intervention. But it's not what God has done to them, finally; it's what we've done to ourselves. Read this book and know we must do better."—Bill Ayers, author of
A Kind and Just Parent"
I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine is a light shining in the hearts of locked-up kids sleepwalking past the buried treasure they are and may never find. From his long and devoted work in prisons trying to breathe life into these hearts, 'Mr. C' is able to speak with authority and eloquence about how the American correctional system can almost bring the saintly to their knees. A book for anyone interested in the hardship and struggle, and (strangely) innate joy, involved in human transformation."—Dennis Sullivan, coauthor of
Restorative Justice
