Launched with starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus and appearances on Fresh Air and the Tavis Smiley Show, Burning Down the House went on to win the Silver Gavel Award in Media and the Arts from the American Bar Association and was named one of the Best Big Ideas of 2014 by The Daily Beast, a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, and “What to Read” by Glamour Magazine.
Burning Down The House
One in three American schoolchildren will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that fly in the face of everything we know about how to rehabilitate young offenders. In a clear-eyed indictment of the juvenile justice system run amok, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein shows that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isolation denies delinquent children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults.
Bernstein introduces us to youth who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state. Too many will never recover from the experience, creating a cycle that leaves the public less safe, not more so. Bernstein presents them all as fully realized people, not victims. As they describe in their own voices their fight to maintain their humanity and protect their individuality in environments that would deny both, the young people offer a hopeful alternative to the doomed effort to reform a system that should only be dismantled.
Burning Down the House is a clarion call to shut down our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and bring our children home.