Starred Review for Publishers Weekly (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

It's hardly surprising that Texas, with its reputation for being big, brash and tough, would run one of the country's most aggressive programs for criminal youth. Teenagers who commit violent crimes are confined to a secure campus, but the Texas Youth Commission also provides them with an opportunity to reclaim their future. In this important book, Hubner, an editor for the <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">San Jose Mercury News, expertly examines the big picture: the spike in juvenile crime from 1984 to 1994, and the legislative initiatives that led to the creation of the TYC. It's his ability to tie those facts to the reality of daily life at the Giddings State School through the eyes of the students, therapists, teachers and athletic coaches that gives this book its power. Hubner focuses on Elena and Ronnie, two young offenders at Giddings, as they are forced to confront and make sense of their pasts, re-enacting the most traumatic scenes of their childhoods and their crimes. Like Elena and Ronnie, nearly all the students at Giddings come from chaotic, abusive families. Hubner underscores the TYC's success in contrast to national recidivism rates for youthful offenders, which hover between 50% and 60%; a 2004 study reported that only 10% of graduates of the school's Capital Offenders group have been rearrested for a violent crime after three years on parole. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Agents, Miriam Goderich and Jane Dystel. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(On sale Sept. 6)

ALA Booklist

Texas may have the reputation for being aggressive when it comes to executions, but the state also operates one of the more successful and innovative juvenile-correction facilities in the country. As journalist Hubner learned, Giddings State School is anything but ordinary. Although it is home to many of Texas' most violent young men and women, the rehabilitation facility, which houses some 300 convicted teens, looks more like a college campus than a detention center. It even has a winning football team. But as Hubner clearly shows, the school's combination of aggressive group therapy, traditional correctional methodology, and strict discipline is extremely rigorous, and some kids can't hack reliving the abuse and neglect they suffered and accepting responsibility for their own criminal behavior. Their emotional stories--poignant, shocking, and sometimes difficult to read--are interlaced with fascinating insights into the criminal justice system. Readers of this eye-opening account will find themselves reflecting on their own attitudes about juvenile justice as it's administered today.

Kirkus Reviews

Life inside the Giddings State School, a boot camp that has a track record in converting violent offenders. Texas is a funny place: Its prisons (and at least one former governor) make a specialty of executing the mentally retarded, but then someone within the system goes and figures out a humane, confidence-building, recidivism-defying system of dealing with its worst juvenile defenders. San Jose Mercury News editor Hubner ( Somebody Else's Children , 1997) ponders such oddities at various turns in this book about Giddings, where young people are taught the skills to respond to the normal stresses of life without resorting to violence. That's a challenge: Almost all of those Hubner profiles are the children of poverty, with imprisoned, drug-addicted or dysfunctional parents. At Giddings, which a passerby might take for a prep school, nearly 400 offenders are made to live "in one kind of group or another, acquiring skills that were not ingrained in their families of origin"—which, after a time, makes psychologists of most of them, able to recognize when their peers are "fronting," which is to say, faking emotions, and when they're being honest. The set-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief approach requires the young people to own up to what they've done and why. And apparently it works. Critics have accused the school of coddling criminals, and the treatment program is expensive—but, counters Hubner, the real costs of educating a youngster at Giddings are in the end far lower than those of maintaining a criminal in prison, and in all events, none of the young people he tracked who have been released from the school have been rearrested. An unsentimental account of how a criminal career can be derailed early on.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-A thought-provoking documentary about the Capital Offenders Group treatment program at Texas's Giddings State School. The institution houses nearly 400 of the most violent juvenile offenders in a program designed to alter the life trajectory of its residents. Writing from his position as an observer, Hubner sketches a rich tableau of daily observations, describing the rigorous, disciplined regimen wherein boys and girls engage separately in "resocialization" sessions painstakingly choreographed by teams of psychologists. Two students serve as primary case studies. Readers are immersed in the raw intensity of 16-hour days where participants in structured psychodramas form emotional connections, enabling them to identify, confront, and ultimately master destructive behavior patterns. Essential to the process is acknowledging accountability and internalizing a genuine sense of guilt and remorse for the hurt they caused their victims. The program's aggressive methods are considered somewhat controversial, and the author is careful to report this, but lower rates of recidivism are a compelling testimonial to its effectiveness. Readers will have a visceral appreciation of the offenders' hard-won gains, of the volatility and extreme emotions in the healing process, and of the risks of opening up to peers when isolation and rage have long been cultivated as defense mechanisms. The bottom line is that individuals who fail to meet the program's standards are dispatched to serve their sentences in the state penitentiary, in some cases for 25 to 40 years, rather than receiving parole and a fresh start. A sensitively written study, with extensive endnotes.-Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.