This Thursday, 3/25 at 7 pm, David Chura will be at The Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza signing copies of his new book: I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine.
 
I repeat here a blurb I wrote for the book’s flycover, which reflects not only my appreciation for Chura’s remarkable work, but also my years working with homeless teens at Equinox: “David Chura’s timely book ought to destroy our complacency. It takes us inside the locked-down world of neglected and abused youth who’ve been cast away into adult jails and reveals, through its succession of haunting vignettes and surprising turns, a truth that ought to shame us: when youth fail, it is most often because we adults have failed them again and again.”
 
I say the book is “timely” because of a proposal currently before the NYS Legislature called Re-Direct New York, which outlines a strategy for helping troubled kids turn their lives around. To find out more about this legisation, visit the NY website of an advocacy group called Fight Crime, Invest in Kids. There you will find links to research indicating that troubled teens (not all, but most) can be helped far more effectively by community-based programs than by incarceration, which is typically counterproductive and damaging. In New York, for example, we spend an average of $150,000 per year to incarcerate troubed youth in OFCS facilities, yet the recidivism rate for these kids is about 75%, compared to 12% or so in Missouri, where the state spends a fraction of that cost on evidence-based programming.
 
One final thought: I am reminded by Chura’s book of another book that had a formative influence on me years ago: Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who spent years in a Nazi death camp. While kids prisons in NY and Nazi death camps are hardly comparable, and while the two books take very different approaches to their subject matter, they do share a common theme: the remarkable resilence of the human spirit in its ability to preserve meaning and dignity under very challenging circumstances.