I don't feel that I refrain from making any political statements. I don't feel qualified in terms of the history, but what I could say is that right now, the system is not working. Something is very wrong if you have to wait six hours in an office, and then get a three-second interview with someone who doesn't provide you with actual help.

What one reads in the newspaper and what one sees on the street are absolutely not the same. If, for example, in a transition agency, you are told, "Oh, we provide transportation and keep in touch with you about new leads, and counsel you on careers," well, that just isn't true. And a lot of people don't have phones -- I mean, literally, there is often no possibility of contacting them -- so there is a failure of communication. The system is still "same old, same old," except now it's far more punitive. What I am seeing now is that the oldest children are inheriting the burden of parenting, because their mothers are working such crazy long hours, and for such low pay. So if you want to call the fact that they're back to work an improvement, that's just a complicated statement. With "welfare to work," I'm not sure it is.

You're passionate about your subject, but your book isn't at all strident or sentimental.

[Laughter] It took me a long time to get over my sentimentality, to learn how to get myself out of the way. I would have long, active debates with Cesar about the issue of environment vs. choice. The debates were always the same. I would be saying: "But Cesar, you were only 9, you were only 10, look what you'd been through," and he would answer, "Adrian, I knew right from wrong." And I would protest, and he would stop me again and say, "Adrian, I knew what I was doing." These debates were part of the process of me shaking my sentimentality.

But I also know as a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, "Where did the story go, where did the person I'm reading about go?"

There are also some very violent moments. You talk about your characters losing their temper, hurting each other. And yet you don't shy away from those moments. How did you keep your own judgment out of it?

In Cesar's case, I came into this as a feminist, and it did indeed take me a long time to extend empathy to include some of the men. There was so much suffering, and sometimes it was tempting to hang that suffering on the men. If I hadn't worked with Cesar for so many years, I don't know if we would have ever broken through. And Cesar even said to me later, that in the beginning, it was very clear that I was very much wrapped up in Coco's point of view. "You couldn't see it from my mind back then," he told me.

Did you ever feel tempted to preach, rather than stay in your role as an observer?

Well, a lot of the time I didn't even know what was going on, I couldn't analyze what was happening, it took everything I had in me just to get it down. For example, the first time you go into prison, it's intense: every click of a door, every walk down a hall. I would see women laughing and joking, and I couldn't believe it. After a few visits I would also be laughing and joking, but then the next time I'd be dreading it. And in each of these phases, I was taking in different things, and it was just incredibly hard to keep track. So observing was more of a practical thing than me being some kind of a Buddhist. Although, yes, I do sort of go into a state of "attention," because as a journalist, the judgmental part of your brain is useless.

There's one thing I know for sure: When I'm most opinionated, my writing sucks. As my editor would say, "Oh, here we go." In the first drafts of the sections that deal with some of the younger kids, I may as well have been on a soapbox.

There were letters in response to your piece in the New York Times Magazine that essentially said, "These people should not be having babies." What do you think of this response?

Having children is not a class privilege. The moments in the book when people become pregnant and people are born are part of a lifeline. We like to freeze the frame of this lifeline at the moment when a girl gets pregnant, because that is the moment when you can turn the story of social injustice into a personal blaming session. As if you can pinpoint the social problem on a single person, and then you can get into that whole useless discussion about "choice."

But in fact, I think it starts much sooner. There's also sex education, after-school programs, gender orientation. To jump ahead and say, "Let's talk about someone when she's 15 and pregnant," I just think it's a way for people to remain situated in a judgmental place that allows them not to feel the pain, and the sadness, and the shame we should feel, really -- the shame that these young people are not protected the way they should be.

That's another thing about judgment -- it's a way to stay separate from someone else. I think people do it in policy, people do it personally, and they do it literally when then they are confronted with the facts. These comments about teenagers and sex, for example. I mean, teenagers are getting pregnant everywhere, they are having sex everywhere, not just among the poor.

So a letter like that doesn't surprise me, it saddens me. It certainly makes me angry. It makes me feel as if I didn't succeed, it means they want to keep distance from young teenage people who are part of the world we all share.

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