cover image I Cried, You Didn't Listen: The Story of Incarcerated Children

I Cried, You Didn't Listen: The Story of Incarcerated Children

Dwight Edgar Abbott. Feral House, $19.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-922915-07-1

This harrowing volume tells of a young boy ripped from his secure middle-class existence and placed in the thick of California's abusive penal system. In the early 1950s, when Abbott was nine years old, his parents were badly injured in a car crash. Housed for four months at Los Angeles Juvenile Hall, he was beaten by the other children and sexually molested by a counselor. This experience began a nonstop pattern of abuse, retaliation and incarceration. Abbott's chronicle takes him from reform school to federal prison, detailing inmate honor codes and caste systems, as well as the diligently enforced homosexual roles of ``straight'' (dominant) and ``punk'' (passive). Although supported by his parents throughout his ordeal, a tragic lack of communication prevented any constructive bond with them. Only through his friendship and eventual affair with Stubby, a fellow Youth Authority prisoner, did Abbott receive and give love during this period in his life. The author's well-written story comes at the reader fast and furiously, Abbott easily achieving his desired goal of shocking readers into an awareness of the inhumanity of America's juvenile penal institutions. Abbott is currently an inmate in the California State Prison; Carter is a freelance writer. (July)