Edward Humes · 400 pages
Rating: (696 votes)
“we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution -- the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Take a trip in my mind
see all that I've seen,
and you'd be called a
beast, not a human being...
Fuck it, cause there's
not much I can do,
there's no way out, my
screams have no voice no
matter how loud I shout...
I could be called a
low life, but life ain't
as low as me. I'm
in juvenile hall headed
for the penitentiary.
George Trevino, sixteen, "Who Am I?”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“from a child in danger to a dangerous child”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“the fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?”
― Edward Humes, quote from No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, 'This isn't supposed to be happening this way,' and trying harder to make it happen some other way.”
― Benjamin Hoff, quote from The Tao of Pooh
“You can touch everything and be connected to nothing.”
― Mitch Albom, quote from Have a Little Faith: a True Story
“This could be our greatest nightmare. But maybe, intead this would be our only hope of salvation.”
― Claudia Gray, quote from Hourglass
“Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet's seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, 'Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?”
― Alan Bradley, quote from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
“There was only the broad square with the scattered dim moons of the street lamps and with the monumental stone arch which receded into the mist as though it would prop up the melancholy sky and protect beneath itself the faint lonely flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which looked like the last grave of mankind in the midst of night and loneliness.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
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