I honestly don’t remember where I got this, but I think it was at a used bookstore this summer. I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine is a collection of stories of David Chura’s time teaching teenagers who were seen as adult criminals legally and were being put into the adult system. He covers a variety of scenarios and tells some very heartbreaking stories that he saw during his tenure as a teacher. His main thesis is that the system is destructive for both the inmates and the corrections officers. At first, he saw only the plight of the teens, but he comes to think that there is no real line between “us” and “them,” and that both sides have shared, common struggles.
While I found the stories interesting, and he had an eye for the interactions of the systems on each other, I thought that his thesis didn’t ring completely true for me. I agree that the corrections workers are also suffering at the hands of the system, but they are not being denied their rights, mistreated, and having their freedoms stripped from them. In one story, he tries to show how one particularly mean woman actually has a softer side and a hard life that presumably makes her take her anger out on the inmates. While I had sympathy for her, she is denying them law library visits, the medication nurse, and writes them up for minor infractions. She is actively making life more difficult and potentially deadly for them, but they have no power to do anything to her. The descriptions of the horrors of solitary confinement also drove home that the prison staff are actively involved in the torture of other human beings. The idea of shared solidarity in broader misery only works so far for me if one side refuses to have empathy for the other. I was interested throughout but this felt somewhat unfinished to me in terms of trying to clarify his broader philosophical point. The stories themselves are meaningful reading, but his thesis didn’t work for me.