Hurting Kids

What Incarcerated Youth Are Teaching Me about Whiteness, Compassion, Accountability, and Healing

Michelle Mary Lelwica

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781666735536
  9781666792706
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666792713
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

Hurting Kids explores religion's impact on Americans' beliefs about justice and on teenagers who get in trouble with the law. Why do many of us assume that punishment is an appropriate moral response to crime? How have diverging Christian narratives about divine punishment and God's mercy supported different responses to juvenile wrongdoing? What do these competing notions of justice imply for youth "offenders" today, nearly all of whom have been violated by the unjust and traumatic circumstances of their lives? Weaving together research on the juvenile justice system, theological analysis, self-examination of white privilege, and the stories and perspectives of incarcerated youth, Hurting Kids asks us to understand and care about the complicated humanity of a population of teenagers who are often deemed not only "delinquent" but dispensable. Sharing snippets of her conversations with incarcerated youth, Lelwica demonstrates that whatever harm these kids have inflicted on others is rooted in the painful experiences they have survived--experiences that are shaped by systemic injustices that benefit people with privilege. Ultimately, Hurting Kids challenges common assumptions about "guilt" and "innocence," while advocating for a kind of justice for youth that promotes equity, compassion, accountability, and healing for all.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Seventh Angel
• Chapter 2: Divine Humanity
• Chapter 3: “People with Privilege Need to Hear Our Stories”
• Part I: Whiteness
• Chapter 4: “Don’t You Think White People Need to Learn about Race?”
• Chapter 5: What Is “Whiteness”?
• Chapter 6: What Does Whiteness Look Like?
• Chapter 7: “It’s Weird to Stare into Someone’s Eyes”
• Chapter 8: “How Come You’re Not Afraid of Us?”
• Chapter 9: “Hey, No Disrespect to Your Silver Spoon”
• Chapter 10: “If There’s a God, He’s an Asshole”
• Chapter 11: “I Was Born a Criminal”
• Chapter 12: “Because I’m a Bad Kid”
• Chapter 13: “I Want to Know What Really Happened”
• Chapter 14: “I Did Not Know How to Feel”
• Chapter 15: “Same Old, Same Old”
• Chapter 16: “Not All Black Kids Are the Same”
• Chapter 17: “A Shitty Hand of Cards”
• Chapter 18: “I’d Give Anything to Be Able to Decide What to Have for Breakfast”
• Chapter 19: “I Have All the Time in the World”
• Chapter 20: “My Bad, My Bad”
• Chapter 21: “Showing Your True Feelings Made You Look Weak”
• Chapter 22: “I Hope My Daughter Grows up to Be a Lesbian”
• Chapter 23: “I Come from Violence”
• Chapter 24: “Hood Dreaming”
• Chapter 25: “I Want to Be Sure People Understand Me”
• Part II: Compassion
• Chapter 26: The Creative Power of Life
• Chapter 27: What Is Compassion?
• Chapter 28: “Dead or in Jail”
• Chapter 29: “Deep Streets”
• Chapter 30: “Bro”
• Chapter 31: “When Kids Don’t Have a Chance to Be Kids When They’re Kids”
• Chapter 32: “The Reason Kids like Us Do Drugs . . .”
• Chapter 33: “Houses of Refuge”
• Chapter 34: “Does Punishment Work?”
• Chapter 35: “What Keeps Me up at Night”
• Chapter 36: “You Have to Believe In Jesus or You’re Going to Hell”
• Chapter 37: “I’m Afraid of God”
• Chapter 38: “I Would Talk about . . .”
• Chapter 39: “I Already Died Once”
• Chapter 40: “All the Love in My Heart Went Out of Me That Day”
• Chapter 41: “Grievid”
• Chapter 42: “We Were Not Violent Girls. We Were Girls Who Were Hurting”
• Chapter 43: “When Someone Is Beating up Your Mom”
• Chapter 44: “That’s When I Knew That My Brother Was Dead Too”
• Chapter 45: “I Want to Give Him, Just like the Rest of My Family, the World”
• Part III: Accountability
• Chapter 46: “A Cold-Blooded Killer”
• Chapter 47: What Does It Mean to Be Accountable?
• Chapter 48: “The Wages of Sin Is Death”
• Chapter 49: “That’s Two Years of My Life Down the Drain”
• Chapter 50: “J’ai Dû M’Fuir de Chez Moi” (I Had to Run Away from My Family)
• Chapter 51: “I Wasn’t Even Holding the Gun”
• Chapter 52: “Monster”
• Chapter 53: “My Brother Is Six Feet in the Ground”
• Chapter 54: “Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned”
• Chapter 55: “Sleeping Bags of Self-Pity”
• Chapter 56: “Nobody Asked Me Why I Did What I Did”
• Chapter 57: “When I Was in the Sixth Grade, I Got into a Fight at School”
• Chapter 58: “I’m Not Going to Apologize for Things I’m Not Sorry For”
• Chapter 59: “Out There, It’s ‘Live by the Gun, Die by the Gun’”
• Chapter 60: “I Only Have Myself to Blame”
• Chapter 61: “We Are All Criminals”
• Chapter 62: “The Belief That I Won’t Get Caught”
• Part IV: Healing
• Chapter 63: “I Don’t Know Why I Keep Ending Up in Jail”
• Chapter 64: What Does Healing Mean?
• Chapter 65: “The Kinship of Heaven”
• Chapter 66: “He Was Really Thirsty!”
• Chapter 67: “Being on the Run”
• Chapter 68: “It’s Been a Hard Week”
• Chapter 69: “You Go to the Margins So That the Folks There Make You Different”
• Chapter 70: The Hula Dance
• Chapter 71: “Because It Calms Our Amygdala”
• Chapter 72: “What Have You Been Struggling with Lately?”
• Chapter 73: “If I Can’t Learn to Control My Temper . . .”
• Chapter 74: “I Was Thinking That I Probably Need Forgiveness from You”
• Chapter 75: “I’m Thankful to Be Here and Not under the Ground in the Cemetery”
• Chapter 76: “Those Who Cannot Be Redeemed Have No Place in a Civilized Society”
• Chapter 77: “All of Them Have Some Type of Involvement with the Juvenile Justice System”
• Chapter 78: “You Can’t Be Happy If You Have PTSD”
• Chapter 79: “Which Wolf Will You Feed?”
• Chapter 80: “No One Ever Taught Me How to Love Myself”
• Chapter 81: “When We Were Dancing”
• Chapter 82: “It’s a Huge Slap in the Face to Enjoy the Little Things”
• Chapter 83: “I’d Create a Program for Kids like Me”
• Chapter 84: “You Can’t Trust Anyone until You Trust Yourself”
• Chapter 85: “I Am Enough. This Is Enough”
• Conclusion: “LOVE ME”
• Bibliography