Richard Ross (10)

This is an amazing resource. Really well done photographs, great layout, lots of statistics and data presented accessibly.

Also, really hard to read. You should pair it with [b:No Choirboy|3466294|No Choirboy Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row|Susan Kuklin|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316739228s/3466294.jpg|3507596] for a period of reading really good and simultaneously awful information about juvenile justice.

They only thing they could have added would have been a glossary like this one: http://www.kalcounty.com/occ/terms.htm
… (mere)

This is a photographic album of kids in different prison systems across the U.S. From the back cover; "The nearly 150 images in this book were made over 5 years of visiting more than 1,000 youth confined in more than 200 juvenile detention institutions in 31 states." What he found was hopeless kids in horrible situations with little chance of improving their situations. One chilling fact given was how much more the city of Oakland spends annually on one incarcerated youth than one student in school. His point was made.

Since the individuals are all under age their faces are not shown. If their faces are not cropped out of the picture or blurred, they are frequently covered by the kid's hands or shirt pulled up or covered with sheets. In these cases, the body language of despair, shame, self-disgust, or whatever is enhanced by their effort to hide their identity. Whether done on purpose or not, it is powerful.

This book recently received an Alex Award for an adult book with special appeal to teens.… (mere)