No Choirboy by Susan Kuklin

The subtitle is Murder, Violence and Teenagers on Death Row, which should give you a pretty good idea of what the book is about. Each chapter is about a different boy who is on death row (in Texas, Florida, West Virginia) for the crimes he committed before he turned 18. Each chapter except one is told from the condemned boy's point of view; each boy seems truly sorry for his crimes, crimes that none of the boys deny committing. And, although you cannot help feel sorry for these boys (after all, being on death row has to be a terrifying thing even for a grown man), it is hard to forget the victims of their crimes. Rather than illustrate how wrong (or right) the death penalty is, this book illustrates how we need to change the early lives of poverty stricken, educationally challenged kids. None of the kids in the book came from wealthy families; all of them had rotten circumstances in their lives that fed them into a criminal world. Changing a death penalty law will not deter much: none of these boys were concerned with the repercussions of the illegal activities they were involved in. You feel sorry for them, yes. But let's try to help the other children like them before they get to the point of killing someone. Let's try to change their lives so they can see choices other than the ones that ruin their own life, take away someone else's life of someone else, and indelibly mark the victim's family (and their own family's, for that matter).