No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

This is one powerful book: it will grab you with vivid stories about individual kids, draw you in with honesty and compassion, and amaze you with alarming details about how the juvenile justice system works (or rather, doesn't work) in America. Anyone interested in the problem of crime should read Edward Humes's gripping account of how future criminals are shaped in youth, and how the system misses its chance to help them before they're lost for good. As Richard Bernstein writes in the New York Times, "There are many admirable things about Mr. Humes's book, which, despite its grim subject matter, has a narrative power that keeps you reading right to the end. One of them is that Mr. Humes is a shrewd and perceptive observer of his young subjects ... [and he] allows himself to feel sympathy for the young people whose lives and crimes he describes.... At the same time, Mr. Humes never exonerates bad children for their badness." No Matter How Loud I Shout was a finalist for the 1997 Edgar Award in Fact Crime.