If you want to know what it's like inside the juvenile corrections facility in Chicago, this book will give you all the details about how the place works (and doesn't work). However, it's a memoir and not a book about the facilty and the kids who end up there so the major insights are into the experiences of a man who became an attendant for a year, eager to make a difference and sure, after leading bible study there, that he could. Soon he realizes being essentially a white jail guard of mostly black youth (working with mostly black colleagues) that it's no so easy. We learn a lot about his struggles to maintain order and present a stronger, more masculine front when he's quaking inside, and we learn something about some of the incarcerated kids. I would be more interested in a book about the kids, how they got there, what the social context is - which is not what this book sets out to do. It's a memoir and it's fine, but the author can't really take us inside the lives of the kids who he wanted to help, and that's kind of the whole point. But sometimes that honestly-narrated distance frustrated me because it seemed like a book about trying to live among impenitrable hostile Others for a year before giving up and going home. That said, maybe we need books that are honest about that issue.