Falling Back By Jamie Fader

If I stay, which is an outstanding novel written by Gayle Forman, was published in 2009 and is an emotionally gripping story. The most interesting part of the novel starts with Mia’s life after the accident. The readers also learn about her life before the tragedy with the help of plentiful flashbacks. She recalls her colorful and vibrant family members so vividly that they could easily step off the page and break the hearts of the readers. Furthermore, her remembrances also highlight her passion for music and romance with her boyfriend. Moreover, the readers will find the entire novel very interesting and inspiring and will also find the climax of the novel very satisfying. The story revolves around seventeen year old Mia, who finds herself dealing with the aftermath of a terrible car accident which killed her entire family. During the coma, Mia goes through an out-of-the-body experience and observes all her friends and family that gather at the hospital. The memory of Mia flashes before her and she debates about whether or not she should wake up and face the grief of losing her family or, if she should die. Before summarizing the story, it is pertinent that the main characters of the story should be discussed briefly.

This article climbs into the struggle of young black males. Many issues that are recurring such as early school dropout, delinquency, poverty, unemployment, incarceration, fatherless, and they don’t have much of a chance to lead a successful life. Most black males are set up to fail at this rate and all this leads to a need to develop interventions to save those lost lives of the young black communities.

Youth are often confronted with socio-economical and political challenges including poverty, ethic and minority status and are often cited as at risk for committing long-term community problems like rise in crime due to substance abuse, school drop-out and several forms of academic failures, delinquencies, criminal offenses and unemployment (e.g. Grisso, Vincent & Seagrave, 2005; Champion & Mays, 1991; Fellmeth, 2002). According to Grisso and his colleagues (2005), the argument that in order to help young offenders that were placed under rehabilitation centers reconnect to community and avoid recidivism is to provide them education and employment opportunities upon release. It is in this area where mentoring programs to

In other words, no behavior is inherently deviant on its own. According to this theory, it's the reaction to the behavior that makes it deviant or not; such as the development of stigma. Deviance is defined as a behavior that departs from societal or group norms. Rios argues that the punishing arm of the state (the prison system) and the nurturing arm of the state (the education system) work together to criminalize, stigmatize, and punish young inner city boys and men which he coins this form of criminalization as the “youth control complex”. This culture of punishment that comes from this complex pushes the young men into the very criminality that the punishment is meant to deter. The “hypercriminalization” notably harms these young men. Sometimes they would sell drugs because they believed they had no choice and nothing to lose. The author acknowledges such choices are unhealthy but explains that young men make them in the context of the limited resources available to them. The punishments meted out by the criminal justice system usually fail to support rehabilitation and social reintegration. Instead, once young men of color have entered the criminal justice system, they have “negative credentials” which lead to further stigmatization and criminalization in schools, in the community, and other institutions, and which severely restrict their

The novel that I have decided to make a report on is the book Ashfall by Mike Mullin. My reaction to the book Ashfall was "Wow, Alex is really brave". If I was in his situation , I don't think I would have reacted the way he reacted. Alex took control and focused on one thing and that was finding his family.

Denise Giardina, the author of, “Storming Heaven” does an exquisite job of using the point of view from four different narrators’ point of view to portray the story of the lives of the miners’. The use of the different point of views from Cincinnatus a socialist, Rondal a union organizer, Carrie a nurse, and Rosa an Italian immigrant is a brilliant idea to show the different impacts among several individuals and give different moods and views throughout the different narration. The story takes place in a mining community in a rural town in southwestern West Virginia. She uses the five senses to paint a picture and make it feel as if the readers are one of the many individuals within the story. Giardina does a superb job of using the abuses of the miners and stooges to show how his or her lives were and what caused the uprising in 1921. She uses the oppression of the workers’ to create a sympathetic mood amongst the readers. The way Denise Giardina portrays the atrocities that occur during the events within the story, shows how the coal companies treat the coal miners and how the companies don’t care about whether their workers or their children die.

Clearly, there is a need to make communities safe and assist a population of African American male youth, that are headed towards a continued self destruction path, of criminal life. Causes such as lack of employment, lack of education, social disparities and an injustice justice system, leads to high recidivism rates among African-American juvenile offenders. It is imperative that programs are implemented in areas such as rehabilitation, intervention, job ready skills, substance abuse treatment, educational skills and anti-social behavior programs, to help move the African American male juvenile youth into a positive direction. In a direction of not having to make life criminal choices, from living in communities of disparities and

The phenomena known as the cradle to prison pipeline has been cited as a major contributor to racial discrepancy of incarceration rates. The phrase denotes the ever-increasing amount of contact that students have with the juvenile and adult criminal justice system. The “pipeline” is a product of schools adopting strict zero-tolerance polices , Schools that inpose these polices lagerly exist within communities of color due to the precived . In America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline, the President of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman states “disparities start early and continue throughout African Americans’ lives. Black children are pushed out of school given no meaningful alternatives and soon find themselves in the criminal justice

Black youths are admitted to state correctional facilities for drug offenses at 48 times the rate of white youths, according to a report by the Building Blocks for Youth Initiative. (CITATION) There is obviously a problem in the programming of the successful African American youth. If a shortage can be created in the circuit of this problem, then the rate at which these young men are straying can be decreased.

Getting on with life after getting out of prison shouldn’t be as difficult as society and the government make it. By labeling someone a criminal the stigma that follows them will continue for the rest of their lives. There is discrimination with employment, housing and under federal law, people convicted of drug felonies are deemed ineligible for food stamps. The penal system appears to be a system of social control rather than a system of crime prevention. “Many of Wisconsin 's Black Male Offenders Go Back to Prison, Struggle to Stay Out” is an article about the black men in prison and how Larry Jackson’s first run in with the law placed him in a juvenile center when he was only nine years old. For 20 years he has been in and out of prison, this paper will attempt to apply theories on why it is so difficult for young men to stay out of prison.

Before tackling the diversion programs we must change the way school employees operationalize their current rules. School cannot hold other social structures responsible for their shortcoming but, they can rebuke the culture that promotes ideologies for the mistreatment of youth. Eliminating exclusionary practices would shift strategies in which school operates. Focusing more on empowering education, building trust and a caring learning environment and positive behavioral strategies. These are some of the tools that can provide a stepping stone in helping youth of color jump over the school to prison pipeline. If the child does enter the system, priorities should be placed on rehabilitative and restorative efforts over punishment(Hess and Orthmann

Analyzing teens from minority backgrounds within the juvenile justice system will also be necessary to understand why/how they were removed from their educational institutions. This is that research by Hsia, Bridges, and McHale reports, “Minority youth comprise over 60 percent of children detained by juvenile justice systems across the United States, (as cited in Nicholson-Crotty, Birchmeier, and Valentine, 2009, p. 1003). Exploring and understanding the experiences minority students have with suspensions, expulsions, and the juvenile justice system will help create an advocacy plan that provides better intervention for misbehaviors, rather than removing them from their educational

In the last decade, the punitive and overzealous tools and approaches of the modern criminal justice system have seeped into our schools, serving to remove children from mainstream educational environments and funnel them onto a one-way path toward prison. These various policies, collectively referred to as the School-to-Prison Pipeline, push children out of school and hasten their entry into the juvenile, and eventually the criminal, justice system, where prison is the end of the road. Historical inequities, such as segregated education, concentrated poverty, and racial disparities in law enforcement, all feed the pipeline. The School-to-Prison Pipeline is one of the most urgent challenges in education today. (NAACP 2005)

To the uninitiated, the significance of Flannery O 'Connor 's Parker 's Back can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character 's emotional devastation. Flannery O 'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand; like all good writers, crass didacticism is abhorrent to her. Unlike some more cryptic writers, O 'Connor was happy to discuss the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of her stories, and this candor is a godsend for the researcher that seeks to know what makes the writer tick.

Refugees flee their country only if they are in danger or are hurt. The novel, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, Ha and her family has come from a place called Saigon, where people love one another, help and care for each other. But since the Vietnam War has reached their country, they are forced to leave their home. When Ha was living in Saigon, she was very happy and lived life the way she wanted and dreamed of. But when she fled her country everything changed. We need to know that refugees need our help because they are in places where they have nothing to count on and have no one to care for because they are all alone.