Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Kindle
$12.99

Available instantly

Hardcover
$20.95

Paperback
$16.00

$16.00

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Thursday, May 16 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery Wednesday, May 15. Order within 16 hrs 58 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$16.00 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

30-day easy returns

Returns

30-day easy returns

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$6.10

Fast Shipping - Safe and Secure 7 days a week! Fast Shipping - Safe and Secure 7 days a week! See less

$3.99 delivery Monday, May 20. Details

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$16.00 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Ships from and sold by BOOK BARN 87.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (18) from $6.10 + $3.99 shipping

Follow the author

David Chura

+ Follow

More books from this author

I Don't Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup Paperback – February 22, 2011

by David Chura (Author)

4.2 18 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$16.00","priceAmount":16.00,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"16","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"00","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"%2F6684vLOTOhFQ8mdWu4kpb1T8RVYvi6BdWLcj79rx1Nr3vAZFbmcwEUEM5609BaCl0CSuSKCM3mS3%2BbACW8CJfFdH71SlfFQBon2fj1yPpeMMwLljdTKOUJ2AL0A1KLvfQFvLJSvjq0%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$6.10","priceAmount":6.10,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"6","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"10","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"%2F6684vLOTOhFQ8mdWu4kpb1T8RVYvi6BNw5YOQRtoCO%2BF7MMrKXh%2FOc9PHZsq5uds9eLKsaHr6YT8EUh10z4gqTTLKGxHPmtsYiRqCi2i7n9PA4Wcu4L7Ug1%2FzIvUPh3vkNJv7R0PPgKX1qb6kh1aPu78nqv7fKB0uUKHzW2tYBwgEAtUYYcSw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

A veteran teacher gives an “inside” view of the lives of juveniles sentenced as adults

David Chura taught high school in a New York county penitentiary for ten years—five days a week, seven hours a day. In these pages, hegives a face to a population regularly demonized and reduced to statisticsby the mainstream media. Through language marked by both the grit of the street and the expansiveness of poetry, the stories of these young people break down the divisions we so easily erect between us and them, the keepers and the kept—and call into question the increasing practice of sentencing juveniles as adults.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Riveting . . . An indictment of the system.”—Sam Roberts, New York Times

“As U.S. courts send more than 250,000 minors each year into adult prisons (according to a 2008 Juvenile Justice report), Chura’s anguished, incisive depiction of one of those outposts is . . . a compelling call to repair our society’s brokenness.”—Cathi Dunn MacRae, Youth Today

“In its many twists and turns, the book discovers in the prison labyrinth a metaphor of the confinements and refuges of the human spirit. In the face of every person he so carefully depicts, the author shows us a mirror.”—David Kaczynski, Times Union

“[Chura] recalls the raw, gritty emotions of young men with little education and few options. . . . A compelling personal look at the failings of the juvenile justice system.”—Booklist

About the Author

David Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth. Visit his website Kids in the System.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the Introduction

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 morning and on the bus; the drug user and the drug dealer who were more addicted to the streets than to school; the kid who couldn’t let a rule go by without challenging it and the teacher who issued it; the special ed student whose classification was dropped to save a district money; the fighter, the isolate, the bully, the victim.

Yet, while the districts might have seen alternative schools as dumping grounds, the students and staff in these programs saw them as safe havens. My school was small, personal, and tolerant. Even though students came from a variety of towns—rich and poor, rural and suburban, diverse and segregated by money or race— everyone, including the principal, was on a first-name basis. It was a small attempt to bring down “the system” that had tripped up so many of our kids with its rules and regulations.

For most of my years at the school, there was a calm and security that many of my public schoolteacher friends reported was rapidly eroding in their classrooms with stories of guns, gangs, and teacher assaults. Our students might have been trouble elsewhere, they might have resented being kicked out of their home districts and banished from their towns for eight hours a day, but for them the alternative school was a refuge, and they kept it that way.

Then in the early ’90s things began to change. Schools were pressured for more student accountability. More standardized tests were introduced; course requirements were increased; and attendance and dropout rates were more closely looked at, at the same time that education budgets were getting tighter.

As a result, students who before might have been subtly encouraged to drop out; shunted off to GED programs; or put on homebound tutoring (a sure bet, in my experience, that a student would disappear—a quick solution to the district’s attendance problem), as well as those with addiction or emotional problems, were shipped out to alternative programs like ours. Now, the kids getting off the school buses from their hometowns were angrier, more troubled, more reckless, more hounded by the wolves—crack, AIDS, guns, abuse—that increasingly hunted the hood.

At the same time, the media was increasingly filled with stories about out of control teenagers. We were told that America was a riot of carjackings; gang wars; random and senseless violence; attacks against ordinary middle-class citizens. Although teenage crime— grist for the local news mill—has always been overreported (even though it accounts for only 40 percent of violent crime statistics overall), the national media more and more sensationalized and, in a perverse way, romanticized it.

The war on crime was brewing into a war on kids.

But as those of us who worked with the young people demonized by this coverage knew, only one side of the story was being told. News reports rarely told about families shattered by crushing economic pressures and unemployment; decaying neighborhoods; or about grandmothers burdened with second families birthed by the loss of an adult child—and parent—to addiction or disease. And rarely reported were the desperate lives these teens led in juvenile care, rehabs, or psych hospitals, or—when all else failed—on the open road.

Yet, in the face of all this, the alternative school where I taught remained a sanctuary even while, like everywhere else around us, our budget and staff were cut despite our population’s neediness. Some days it was more like a triage center and emergency room than a school; but we all worked to maintain that sense of security.

Until one day the campus erupted, the police were called, and safety disappeared.

Bono was one of those new, more damaged kids. At fourteen, the smallest and youngest boy on campus, everybody liked him, so everybody liked picking on him in that good-natured “talking trash” way that adolescents get into. But good-natured “talking trash” became trash, and Bono had had enough. Before the staff knew what was happening, kids poured out of the classrooms into the parking lot ready to settle scores none of us knew they were keeping, swinging fists and knives and weights stolen from the gym. In the confusion of attack and arbitration, I was knocked down. After the police were called and the melee was over, and I found my glasses, I began to see things differently.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Beacon Press (February 22, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807001236
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807001233
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.52 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,534,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,689 in Children's Studies Social Science (Books)
- #3,120 in Law Enforcement (Books)
- #3,186 in Law Enforcement Biographies

Customer Reviews:
4.2 18 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

David Chura

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

David Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and adviser on incarcerated youth. Visit his website Kids in the System at http://kidsinthesystem.wordpress.com/.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

18 global ratings

2 star

0%

1 star

10%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Janice

Is Change on the Horizon?

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2014

Verified Purchase

David Chura’s book could have easily been titled; How Much Worse Can This Get? If the Reader has never been in a jail setting, this is an eye opener. If the Reader has had experience in such a setting, it packs a pretty painful resonance. This is such a difficult review for me to pen because I fall in the latter category.

I hope Mr. Chura does not mind this advice to the reader, but save his introduction for the end–start instead at Chapter One–The Human Stain. Go into this memoir with no background, no statistics, no author biography–go with naivety–lacking knowledge, confidence and preconceptions of any kind. Just be yourself, seeing through the eyes of Teacher “Mr. C” as if in the first person. Let him be your experiential transport and emotions and conclusions all of your own making.

Mr. Chura steps aside and leaves plenty of room for experiential learning-this is something that great teachers do. Your emotions will be tugged in all directions but this is part of the process.

Perhaps at the end of this memoir, you the Reader, will ask , What can I do to contribute to positive change in my own community, home or school? If this book doesn’t move you in this direction, there is little else that will. If nothing else, I can promise it will take you on quite a ride.

One final note: If you feel that Mr Chura’s work is an exaggeration in any way, see also newly published, Crosswinds: Memoirs of a Jail Teacher and/or Tales of a Jailhouse Librarian: Challenging the Juvenile Justice System One Book At A Time. Maybe the juvenile system CAN be successfully changed one day-- one book at a time...

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2013

Verified Purchase

Good book, went straight to my kindle and wasn't expensive. Would purchase again. It is a great way to get a book without leaving the comforts of home.

Helpful

Paula G. Ingalls

A must read and an engaging educational experience...

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2016

Verified Purchase

I am a teacher in a correctional facility and have used I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine, in my reading classes. David Chura is a phenomenal writer who captured his experience teaching in Westchester County Jail in a way few others could have. His realistic description of the correctional environment, the unique characters and the poignant stories of Thunder, Ray, Angel, Wade, Luis, Felipe, Darquel, Jason, Kahlil, Edgar, Pyro, Amber, Smokey, Krystal Star, Ayesha, Wild Thing, Anna, Dario, Warren, Jonathan, Dominic, and Tony thoroughly engaged my students and served to literally inspire many of them to read their first book ever from cover to cover. In addition, the stories prompted lively discussions and allowed students to express their true feelings about their own experience in both life and in corrections. Our favorite chapter was “Chicks in the Big House” and our favorite character was Jonathan. Although Jonathan had a very difficult life filled with abuse; the tenderness with which he cared for Cripple was awe-inspiring. Grand Opening (Chapter 17), really made us all think about solitary confinement and its effect both on the staff who manage it and inmates who experience it. If you are looking to read a book that truly “tells it like it is” with respect to the correctional environment and makes you think hard about its impact on staff and inmates then I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine is both a must read and an engaging educational experience. Masterful job David!!!

Helpful

Drew Rogers

Great look into the issues of early adult incarceration

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2015

Verified Purchase

Chura's personability with the teenagers provide provides interesting lessons of what is like to be entering the prison system at a young age. Some of these kids are sitting on a precipice where a slight misstep will have severe lasting consequences on such precious years of their life. Along with the revelations of early adult incarceration the book is speckled with life wisdom. There also seems to be an underlying theme with the kids in lockup relating to abandonment and lack of self-worth. Recommend for community development and activists.

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2013

Verified Purchase

i was there with David for 10 years of that time and love his perspective. I so wish there was a way to amend the process of incarceration and help it live out the true meaning of it's name "Department of Correction" vs what they are commonly known as "Jails or Prisons".

David gives insight as to how and I can say he practiced what he preaches and always sought to better the lives of the young people he taught.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Rkm

Right cover wrong book inside

Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2017

Verified Purchase

This book was suppose to be I don't wish nobody to have a life like mine by David Chura. The cover is right but the inside is a book titled big box swindle by Stacy Mitchell

Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2012

A series of vignettes taken from the author's experiences working as a teacher for juveniles in an adult jail in New York. He takes the dialog down verbatim so expect to see plenty of F-words. Chura has a gift for capturing the personalities (both the kids and the prison staff) in just a couple of pages, and you wind up pitying all of them and wondering what could be done to fix the terrible mess that is the corrections system in America. I would recommend it with like books such as the early nineties juvenile justice treatment No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court .

One person found this helpful

Helpful

George Hamilton

A compelling and compassionate insider's view

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2013

This is a non-fiction book, but many of David Chura's stories about life on the inside of a detention centre for the juveniles that he taught there have a fictional quality. It's funny in places, and in some, as lyrical as many of my favourite novels. We learn something of the drug addicted, alcoholic, and downright appalling parenting that led many of the young people down the murky path to a jail cell. The author points to the fact that many of the young people leave these institutions more wounded than when they arrived, which only sets them up to continue with the reckless behaviour that will see them go through the revolving gates of the prison system throughout their lives. He hints at some solutions, but based on his experiences, a society set on retribution is not ready to contemplate these. If I ever write a novel based on such a setting, this is a book I will have to revisit for some pointed research.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Return this item for free

Follow the author

Image Unavailable