Nearly a quarter of a million youth are tried, sentenced, or imprisoned as adults every year across the United States. On any given day, 10,000 youth are detained or incarcerated in adult jails and prisons. In 1993, one of those teens was Karter Kane Reed, who, at the age of sixteen, stabbed another teenager to death in a high school classroom in a town outside Boston. Convicted of second-degree murder, Karter Reed was sentenced to life in prison.

And that is where the story of  Boy With A Knife begins. This book takes readers on a twenty-year journey, from Karter Reed’s arrest and trial during the “tough on crime” 1990s, through his twenty-year incarceration, to his eventual release in 2013 after he became one of the few men in Massachusetts to sue the parole board and win his freedom. In addition to being a portrayal of one boy trying to come to terms with the consequences of his tragic actions, Boy With A Knife is also a critique of the practice of sentencing youth to adult prisons.

In 2007, from prison, Karter began corresponding with me. We wrote over one hundred letters to each other, and I learned the truth about the boy, who in news articles from the early 1990s, had been condemned as a “monster,” carrying out a “methodical crime.” Instead of a monster, I discovered a fallible human being, a teenager at the time of his crime, who had made a serious, life-changing mistake, but had spent his time in prison maturing into a man who thought each day about the life he had taken, while at the same time fighting the unfair and arbitrary justice of prison officials and the parole board.

Karter’s story raised a swirl of questions about juvenile justice, centered around the sentencing of youth to adult prisons, which led me to write Boy With A Knife, a primer on why we must reform the juvenile justice system, and how we can do it.

Today, Karter Reed is a productive member of society, a homeowner with a steady girlfriend, a steady job, and a college degree. “Yes, he had murdered a boy;” I write in the book, and “yes, he had become a man capable of a truly meaningful life.” If we hope to give such kids a true second chance, creating a just juvenile system must be a priority.

AVAILABLE  APRIL 12, 2016 at  http://igpub.com/boy-with-a-knife/ or request it at your local bookstore.

For speaking or reading engagements, contact trounstinej@gmail.com

Click to read Advance Praise:
 Nell Bernstein, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Judge Nancy Gertner. Piper Kerman,  Dr. Robert Kinscherff, Caroline Leavitt, TJ Parsell, Luis Rodriguez, Shon Hopwood, and Christopher Zoukis.     

Click here for National Book Tour  April-July, 2016