The 57 Bus: Part 3

“Just a big old baby,” campus security officer Carlitta Collins says. “A big rambunctious ball of energy. I always make Lloyd leave whenever I see him here.”

Richard brandished the lighter, pretending to light Lloyd’s sleeve.

If someone had gotten shot in Oakland, odds were that somebody at Oakland High School would be connected, affected, or implicated.

The surgeon said the prognosis was good, Karl assured Nemo.

As the conversation continued, Richard was candid, almost confiding.

They were works in progress, malleable, and could be set on the right path if the law behaved like a stern but loving parent rather than as an instrument of punishment.

Nationally, 58 percent of all incarcerated African American youths are serving their time in adult prisons.

The letter concluded: “We firmly believe that you can demonstrate your office’s commitment to protecting the victims of hate crimes without imposing adult sanctions on juvenile offenders.”

Studies have found that around the world, antisocial behavior increases by a factor of ten during adolescence and then begins to taper off as people reach their early twenties (criminologists call this the age-crime curve).

“You cannot tell when you’re looking at a sixteen-year-old whether they are irredeemably depraved,” explains Barry Feld, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on juvenile justice.

Or are they simply manifesting the worst aspects of adolescence—an obsession with conformity, group identity, and peer approval combined with an appetite for risk and sensation?

The room was always too hot or too cold, and it was often permeated with odd noises.

In the Bible (Jeremiah 1:5) it says "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet to the nations."

The gymnasium was festooned with handmade posters in the blue and white Wildcat colors that said NOT IN OUR SCHOOL and STAND UP TO HATE.

At last Sasha came in, wearing a gray hoodie and a black skirt, legs swaddled in white bandages.