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

David Chura (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Beacon Press (Verlag)
978-0-8070-0065-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Since the early 1990s, thanks to inflamed rhetoric in the media about 'superpredators' and a wave of get-tough-on-crime laws, the number of juveniles in prison has risen by 35 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and their placement in adult prison has increased by 208 percent, according to a 2007 survey by the Campaign for Youth. Since 1992, every state except Nebraska has passed laws making it easier to prosecute youth under eighteen as adults, and most states have legalized harsher sentences for juveniles.

David Chura taught high school in a New York county penitentiary for ten years and saw these young people-and the effects of our laws on them-up close. Here he introduces us to the real kids behind the hysteria: vibrant, animated kids full of humor and passion, kids who were born into families broken up and beaten down by drugs, gang violence, AIDS, poverty, and abuse. He also introduces us to wardens, correctional officers, family members, and doctors, and shows how everyone in this world is a child of disappointment.

We meet Wade, who carries a stack of photos of his HIV-positive mother in his pocket to take out and share with pride. Khalil has spent all fifteen years of his life in foster care, group homes, juvenile detention, and mental hospitals, yet has channeled his inner demons into poetry. There's Anna, a hard-nosed one-time teenage drug baroness who serves as a tutor to students and older women alike, Dominic, a father of two who only reads in jail, and only the Harry Potter books, and Eddyberto, a bright student and self-taught artist whose wildly creative drawings are confiscated and used to accuse him of being a potential terrorist and threat to national security.

Then there's O'Shay, a big, burly, snarling Bronx-Irish classroom officer with a surprising protective side for the underdog, and Ms. Wharton, a hallway officer with a spiky demeanor but a soft spot for animals.

In language that carries both the grit of the street and the expansiveness of poetry, Chura breaks down the divisions we so easily erect between us and them, the keepers and the kept-and shows how, ultimately, we as individuals and as a society have failed these young people.

Textauszug

In 1995, I started teaching high school kids locked up in a New York county jail after working with at-risk teens for thirteen years in a community alternative school. Somehow I always knew I'd end up in jail. Maybe it was the company I'd kept over the years. Inner city kids, homeless old guys, and soup kitchen moms lined up to feed their children, teenagers pushed to the margins of society by drugs and by families and communities that didn't want them. My eyes were opened during the '60s to the 'other America,' the poor, the disenfranchised, the outsider. I got my first lessons in the millstone life of poverty and neglect the summer before college when I worked at an inner city neighborhood center in upstate New York where I grew up. Then, while I was in college, I helped out at a homeless shelter serving meals, giving out clothes, and listening to the desperate stories of the people whose lives and worlds had crumbled around them. But the people who came to the shelter weren't the only ones being pushed to the edge of society by a country at war with itself. Young men my age were being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Many fought, many refused, many died, and my friends and I stood at the gravesites of more than one classmate. Until I came to my own decision. I dropped out of college to file for conscientious objector status and, for my alternative service, worked in a psychiatric hospital in Westchester County, an affluent suburb of metropolitan New York, with young people abandoned by families, friends, and in many case, reason itself. When I returned to college to complete my degree in literature and in psychology--combining my two passions--I knew that I wanted to work with troubled teens because by then I saw that they were the real casualties of our culture, society's young throwaways, fundamentally homeless whether living on the streets, in derelict cars, or in overcrowded shelters, in poorly funded and poorly run group homes, or in families, intact or splintered, ravished by drugs and alcohol, crime and violence, abuse and neglect, poverty and disease. For several years after college, I worked in a community crisis center training other counselors and helping clients, mostly young people, through the dilemmas that crippled their lives and happiness. Then, after several years of doing this intense intervention work, I decided the classroom would be the place where I could engage kids in the more positive aspects of who they were--their energy, their creativity, their fresh way of looking at the world--and give them a reprieve from the chorus of woe that sirened through their lives. In 1982, I walked into my first classroom as an English teacher at a regional alternative high school in Westchester. The program was designed to work with kids from across the county whose districts couldn't handle them. Although students were expected to follow the same standardized curriculum as their counterparts in their previous schools, how that was done was left up to the resourcefulness and tenacity of the teaching staff. In the 1980s and the early '90s, many districts used alternative education as dumping grounds. The young people sent to these programs were seen as trouble--to teachers and administrators, to the neighborhood, to the police, to the community. They were rarely seen as what they really were--trouble to themselves: the senior graduating as a result of social promotion who still couldn't read past a third-grade level, the bright but pregnant fifteen-yearold who was college-bound, but now couldn't get herself up in the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.3.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Besonderes Strafrecht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 0-8070-0065-5 / 0807000655
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8070-0065-6 / 9780807000656