Free Fire in the Ashes by Jonathan Kozol

required an inordinate degree of compassionate attention, not only in the schools but in a broad array of public institutions, to have had the slightest chance of turning back this very angry adolescent from the way that he was heading.
    By his fifteenth birthday, he had been in juvenile detention twice for stealing cars and stripping them. From that point on, he was in and out of court and, within another three years, he would serve the first of several sentences at New York City’s sprawling prison out at Rikers Island.
    Miranda was nearly twelve years old at the time when Christopher first went toRikers Island. She and her sister were going to a Catholic school, which they had attended since they moved into the Bronx. The small foundation I’d established, which was supported by readers of my books, was indirectly paying for tuition. My assistant sent the money to Pietro, rather than the school, because I thought that it was better for the children to enable him to make these payments on his own.
    The children went to school in clean clothes every day. When Pietro didn’t have the money for the laundromat, he or Grandma washed their clothes at home. He couldn’t afford to buy the kind of clothing for the girls I know he would have liked, but what he did buy was in proper taste—no short skirts or tight revealing blouses, which many of the adolescent girls they knew were wearing.
    “The other teenage girls we knew were hanging out with boys,” Miranda said when we talked about her childhood ten or twelve years later. “A lot of them got pregnant and had children by the time they were fifteen. But Ellie and I did not turn out that way. I was playing with dolls still when I was in junior high. Daddy and Grandma wouldn’t let us out at night. If they did, they’d call us in by eight.People in the neighborhood treated us as if they knew we were protected, that we were a close family.”
    Those who knew the family well enough to be aware of what was going on with Christopher, or had observed his rough behavior for themselves, did their best not to give Pietro the impression that they thought he was responsible. They knew he had a sense of guilt, which also came across in letters that he wrote to me. They tried not to compound it.
    Pietro hoped that Christopher’s experience at Rikers Island might have left him scared enough to stay away from dangerous activities. He hoped that it had chastened him. But Christopher’s trajectory over the next years continued on its downward slide, and, far from being sobered by the time he spent in jail, he seemed to have become more hardened, more emboldened.
    The culmination came in 1995 before he was twenty, when he and three other young men grabbed a boy they did not know in the subway in the Bronx and threw him on the train tracks. The boy would very likely have been crushed beneath the train that was approaching if bystanders had not climbed into the pit beside the tracks to rescue him. Christopher was convicted of attempted homicide, and served the next seven years in prison—“upstate,” as most families that I knew euphemistically described the penitentiaries where inmates served long sentences.
    The prison where he served the longest portion of his sentence was seven hours from New York City. The girls went once a month to visit him with Grandma and Pietro—fourteen hours on the bus, leaving the Bronx at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday nights, returning home at 10:00 p.m. on Sundays. “There was something that I couldn’t figure out about his attitude,” Miranda said. “He didn’t act the way you’d think someone would act in prison. It was like ‘no big deal.’Like he didn’t want to think that he was up there in that prison for a reason.”
    After I had had no contact with him for so many years, he now began to write me letters that were postmarked in the town of Alden, which, I found by looking at a map, was roughly equidistant between Buffalo and Attica, the latter of