I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine
  • Published: 1 September 2018
  • ISBN: 9780807001233
  • Imprint: Beacon Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $40.00

I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine

Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup

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A veteran teacher gives an “inside” view of the lives of juveniles sentenced as adults
 
David Chura taught high school in a New York county penitentiary for ten years—five days a week, seven hours a day. In these pages, he gives a face to a population regularly demonized and reduced to statistics by the mainstream media. Through language marked by both the grit of the street and the expansiveness of poetry, the stories of these young people break down the di­visions we so easily erect between us and them, the keepers and the kept—and call into question the increasing practice of sentencing juveniles as adults.
  • Published: 1 September 2018
  • ISBN: 9780807001233
  • Imprint: Beacon Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $40.00
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Praise for I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine

  • "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
  • "[Chura] recalls the raw, gritty emotions of young men with little education and few options...A compelling personal look at the failings of the juvenile justice system." --Booklist
  • "As U.S. courts send more than 250,000 minors each year into adult prisons...Chura's anguished, incisive depiction of one of those outposts is not merely an indictment of the system. It's a compelling call to repair our society's brokenness." --Cathi Dunn MacRae, Youth Today
  • "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. Read this book and know we must do better." --William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent