The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

by Dashka Slater

Transgender people are the victims of an astonishing amount of violence. One out of every four trans people has experienced a bias-driven assault, and the numbers are higher for trans women, trans people of color, and people who identify as neither male nor female. Of the 860 nonbinary people who responded to the 2008 National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 32 percent had been physically assaulted.

Only once you stopped going it just seemed too hard to start again. Days rolled into weeks. Weeks into months. And then at some point you realized you’d entered the future. The one you never planned on. The one where everything was going to be that much harder.

A 2012 analysis by California’s Department of Justice found that cases against black youths were more than twice as likely to be directly filed in adult court than cases against white youths, and cases against Latino youths were more than six times as likely. And the disparity didn’t end there. Once they landed in adult court, young black and brown offenders were also much more likely to serve time. Just one-third of white youths were sentenced to adult or juvenile state correctional facilities in 2012, while two-thirds were given probation or sentenced to serve time in county jails. For kids of color, the ratios were reversed—two-thirds served time in state facilities, while one-third received probation or jail. Nationally, 58 percent of all incarcerated African American youths are serving their time in adult prisons.

Researchers estimate that fewer than 5 percent are members of an organized hate group. Most are young males, either in their teens or early twenties, acting in a group, often immediately after school. In a study of Boston hate-crime prosecutions in the early 1990s, two-thirds of the offenders were categorized as “thrill-seeking”—that is, they were groups of young people “looking for some fun” at the expense of someone they regarded as lower status. The authors of the study found that many of these offenders weren’t even particularly biased toward their victims, but were following the lead of a more biased peer.

the outside world didn’t grasp how easy it was for kids who grew up in poor neighborhoods to take that wrong turn.