Juvenile Delinquency Quotes

“Imagine the message that sent to my sister and me. A cousin violates us, confesses, and walks away with barely a slap on the wrist. I learned at a young age that if I was ever going to see justice for the wrongs done to me, I had to find it myself.”
― Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness

“We believed optimistically that Laurie was a reformed character. I told my husband, on the last day of Laurie's confinement, that actually one good scare like that could probably mark a child for life, and my husband pointed out that kids frequently have an instinctive desire to follow the good example rather than the bad, once they find out which is which. We agreed that a good moral background and thorough grounding in the Hardy Boys would always tell in the long run.

("Arch-Criminal")”
― Shirley Jackson, Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories

“Whatever I fed to his mind, thinking it was nutrition was, in fact, poison. No matter how much a person likes or craves sugar, he should not be raised on the diet of only sugar ~ Rudransh Kashyap”
― Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan

“Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

“Think or don't think, but don't think that you are thinking when you are postulating.”
― Kirtida Gautam, #iAm16iCan

“They're gonna' keep chickening us, that's what they're gonna' do! They wanna' crack us up! ”
― Jamie Phillips

“Whenever my colleagues and I encounter a boy who acts "normal"—not explosively violent, not oppositional to every word, not obsessed with killing and dying, not focused on sexual objectification—we are overjoyed with his potential. Here is one who has a stronger foundation on which to build, one who will not knock down his every success like a child with a brick castle to see if the adults will keep helping him rebuild.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Juvenile Justice: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition (Contemporary World Issues

“Most of his face had been hidden by long, greasy bangs, and he mumbled in a low voice that made him difficult to understand. From what little Kyosuke had been able to make out, Usami had killed one person, but he mostly spent his time at the podium reciting strange names that Kyousuke didn't recognize like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein... Maybe they're actors?”
― Mizuki Mizushiro, サイコメ 1 殺人鬼と死春期を

“Dear Young Black Males… Juvenile Hall, Jail, and Prison are overflowing with young Black youth that look just like you. You’ve got to be willing to change the narrative of your life! Respect yourself by NOT going down that dead-end road. Enough of the countless excuses! Your life matters, right? So, dare to go against the norm, and do the RIGHT things. If not, you’ll find your life disrupted, destroyed, or ended. Is incarceration or death really worth it? Think it through… THINK IT THOUGH. The choice is yours young Kings, choose wisely! Consequences are VERY real.”
― Stephanie Lahart

“I would advise those who think that self-help is the answer to familiarize themselves with the long history of such efforts in the Negro community, and to consider why so many foundered on the shoals of ghetto life. It goes without saying that any effort to combat demoralization and apathy is desirable, but we must understand that demoralization in the Negro community is largely a common-sense response to an objective reality. Negro youths have no need of statistics to perceive, fairly accurately, what their odds are in American society. Indeed, from the point of view of motivation, some of the healthiest Negro youngsters I know are juvenile delinquents. Vigorously pursuing the American dream of material acquisition and status, yet finding the conventional means of attaining it blocked off, they do not yield to defeatism but resort to illegal (and often ingenious) methods.... If Negroes are to be persuaded that the conventional path (school, work, etc.) is superior, we had better provide evidence which is now sorely lacking.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“I cannot think who my residents hurt but how I can give them tools to remain on the right side of civilization.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Juvenile Justice: A Reference Handbook, 2nd Edition (Contemporary World Issues

“Murphy biked circles around the courthouse parking lot like an evil newspaper boy from one of her favorite movies, Better Off Dead. She and Judge Miller Abbott didn't have a great history. Since she'd hit puberty, he'd seen her through two shoplifting convictions, countless underage alcohol issues, a few streaking episodes, and the time she'd mutilated the Bob's Big Boy "Big Boy.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Love and Peaches