Now updated with a new introduction and afterword, this award-winning examination of the nation’s largest juvenile criminal justice system in Los Angeles by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist is “an important book with a message of great urgency, especially to all concerned with the future of America’s children” (Booklist). In an age when violence and crime by young people is again on the rise, No Matter How Loud I Shout offers a rare look inside the juvenile court system that deals with these children and the impact decisions made in the courts had on the rest of their lives. Granted unprecedented access to the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, including the judges, the probation officers, and the children themselves, Edward Humes creates an unforgettable portrait of a chaotic system that is neither saving our children in danger nor protecting us from adolescent violence. Yet he shows us there is also hope in the handful of courageous individuals working tirelessly to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds. Weaving together a poignant, compelling narrative with razor-sharp investigative reporting, No Matter How Loud I Shout is a convincingly reported, profoundly disturbing discussion of the Los Angeles juvenile court’s failings, providing terrifying evidence of the system’s inability to slow juvenile crime or to make even a reasonable stab at rehabilitating troubled young offenders. Humes draws an alarming portrait of a judicial system in disarray.

This national bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize-winner catapults readers to the dark side of the justice system with the powerful true story of one man's battle to prove his innocence. Besieged by murder, rape, and the vilest conspiracies, the all-American town of Bakersfield, California, found its saviors in a band of bold and savvy prosecutors who stepped in to create one of the toughest anti-crime communities in the nation. There was only one problem: many of those who were arrested, tried, and imprisoned were innocent citizens. In a work as taut and exciting as a suspense novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Edward Humes embarks on a chilling journey to the dark side of the justice system. He reveals the powerful true story of retired high-school principal Pat Dunn's battle to prove his innocence, and how he was the victim of a case tainted by hidden witnesses, concealed evidence, and behind-the-scenes lobbying by powerful politicians. Humes demonstrates how the mean justice dispensed in Bakersfield is part of a growing national trend in which innocence has become the unintended casualty of today's war on crime.

In 1997 Mark Salzman, bestselling author Iron and Silk and Lying Awake, paid a reluctant visit to a writing class at L.A.’s Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for violent teenage offenders, many of them charged with murder. What he found so moved and astonished him that he began to teach there regularly. In voices of indelible emotional presence, the boys write about what led them to crime and about the lives that stretch ahead of them behind bars. We see them coming to terms with their crime-ridden pasts and searching for a reason to believe in their future selves. Insightful, comic, honest and tragic, True Notebooks is an object lesson in the redemptive power of writing.

The Cycle of Juvenile Justice takes a historical look at juvenile justice policies in the United States. Tracing a pattern of policies over the past 200 years, the book reveals cycles of reforms advocating either lenient treatment or harsh punishments for juvenile delinquents. Bernard and Kurlychek see this cycle as driven by several unchanging ideas that force us to repeat, rather than learn from, our history. This timely new edition provides a substantial update from the original, incorporating the vast policy changes from the 1990s to the present, and placing these changes in their broader historical context and their place within the cycle of juvenile justice. The authors provide a provocative and honest assessment of juvenile justice in the 21st century, arguing that no policy can solve the problem of youth crime since it arises not from the juvenile justice system, but from deeper social conditions and inequalities. With this highly-anticipated new edition, The Cycle of Juvenile Justice will continue to provide a controversial, challenging, and enlightening perspective for a broad array of juvenile justice officials, scholars, and students alike.

State-of-the-art critical reviews of recent scholarship on the causes of juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice system responses, and public policies to prevent and reduce youth crime are brought together in a single volume authored by leading scholars and researchers in neuropsychology, developmental and social psychology, sociology, history, criminology/criminal justice, and law.

A powerful, bracing and deeply spiritual look at intensely, troubled youth, Last Chance in Texas gives a stirring account of the way one remarkable prison rehabilitates its inmates. While reporting on the juvenile court system, journalist John Hubner kept hearing about a facility in Texas that ran the most aggressive–and one of the most successful–treatment programs for violent young offenders in America. How was it possible, he wondered, that a state like Texas, famed for its hardcore attitude toward crime and punishment, could be leading the way in the rehabilitation of violent and troubled youth? Now Hubner shares the surprising answers he found over months of unprecedented access to the Giddings State School, home to “the worst of the worst”: four hundred teenage lawbreakers convicted of crimes ranging from aggravated assault to murder. Hubner follows two of these youths–a boy and a girl–through harrowing group therapy sessions in which they, along with their fellow inmates, recount their crimes and the abuse they suffered as children. The key moment comes when the young offenders reenact these soul-shattering moments with other group members in cathartic outpourings of suffering and anger that lead, incredibly, to genuine remorse and the beginnings of true empathy . . . the first steps on the long road to redemption. Cutting through the political platitudes surrounding the controversial issue of juvenile justice, Hubner lays bare the complex ties between abuse and violence. By turns wrenching and uplifting, Last Chance in Texas tells a profoundly moving story about the children who grow up to inflict on others the violence that they themselves have suffered. It is a story of horror and heartbreak, yet ultimately full of hope.