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.”
“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?”
“Officially, he was no longer a victim, he was a criminal”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“from a child in danger to a dangerous child”
“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.”
“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?”
“Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.”
“لقد افترس الجوع النفوس وصنع مخلوقات ليس لها وجه لإنسان.
إنهم لا يعيشون، إنهم يتعفنون في حضن بؤس لا نستطيع أن نتصوره، وتقيم السلطات حولهم نطاقاً من الحراسة اليقظة، تتربص بهم كالغربان لترى ان كنت تملك كسرة خبز زائدة . فاذا رأت تلك الكسرة انتزعتها منك ، ولطمتك ،فوق ذلك ، على فمك”
“How about you don't kill anybody for a little bit?"
"I can't make that promise."
Small talk with the dragon. How are you? Eaten any adventurers lately? Sure, just had one this morning. Look, I still got his femur stuck in my teeth. Is that upsetting to you?”
“It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did.”
“The earth is a huge ball which nothing holds up in space except its own motion and magnetism, and we conscious things who occupy it believe we have to move too, in our own space. We can't allow ourselves to lie down and not to do our share and imitate the greater entity.”
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