One L.A. writer’s heartbreaking tour of the school-to-prison pipeline

Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2023: One L.A. writer’s heartbreaking tour of the school-to-prison pipeline

“‘Children of the State,’ Jeff Hobbs’ new book about children caught up in the juvenile justice system, includes some history. There are some telling statistics and discussions of public policy. But ultimately, all of those are bit players: For Hobbs, whose ‘The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace’ won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, storytelling is about the people. So above all, this sensitively written book offers finely wrought portraits of the teenagers in juvenile hall, as well as the educators and counselors trying to help them find safe passage back to — and through — the real world.

“‘When I’m doing the work, I focus on the small scale, on the individuals and the relationships,’ Hobbs said by video from his home in Los Angeles. That was the approach he took with his book about Robert Peace, a bright young man from Newark, N.J., who managed to escape the streets and attend Yale but remained an outsider and was murdered at 30.

“With ‘Children of the State,’ Hobbs does zoom out to note that a quarter of a million kids serve in some form of detention each year: ‘The impact on their lives is deep and long term.’ He knows some of these kids need to be locked up at least briefly — ‘if you pull a gun on someone there needs to be consequences’ — but he believes passionately that their lives still have value, and he hopes to inspire readers to volunteer or advocate for or at least care about the children inside those closed-off buildings.”

Additional reading:

Children of the State: Stories of Survival and Hope in the Juvenile Justice System by Jeff Hobbs on bookshop.org

The New York Times, September 18, 2014: Man Down

LitHub, May 4, 2014: Jeff Hobbs on Telling the Story of Your Murdered Friend