One of the most devastating and heartbreaking books I've ever read. There is such immediacy with Gold's journals which is great, but I would have like a little more perspective too. Amazing record of the growing war on children in the USA.

PARANOIA AND HEARTBREAK by Jerome Gold is made up of unedited entries in the journals Gold kept while he worked at Ash Meadow, a juvenile detention center in rural Washington State. The candid and personal nature of this book makes it a compelling read. Gold, although always sympathetic to the juveniles in his care, nevertheless confesses to viewing some of them as incorrigible, irreparably damaged by abuse or just plain irritating. He profiles several inmates who made an impression in him during his years at Ash Meadows but also goes into some depth about the political complexities he faced in this unionized but underfunded environment.

Gold doesn’t take special care in detailing either the background or the race of the inmates he profiles but readers get the impression that this is definitely a racially mixed group, if not very economically mixed. These are poor kids, most of them victims of abuse, some of them are gang involved and many have been addicted. True to its title, there’s a lot of heartbreak in this book, quite a bit of paranoia and not much hope. That’s the reality I guess. Gold was there for fifteen years so he would know.