Kirkus Review: Before Their Crimes

In 2015, Smith joined a small team of advocates and lawyers who traveled to California prisons to provide workshops related to a new state parole process for incarcerated people whose crimes had been committed before they turned 18. The author’s role with the group took her to Pelican Bay State Prison, where she would facilitate small group discussions that taught prisoners how to “develop insight into their crimes and the factors that might have played a part in their criminal behavior.” Careful to emphasize that the purpose of these sessions was not to make excuses but rather to find explanations for criminality, Smith hoped the meetings would lead to the important but difficult self-examination needed to help offenders change their behaviors and seek rehabilitation. Those initial visits to Pelican Bay were the genesis of this book, which draws on interviews with 29 inmates who had been convicted as youths. The author does not obfuscate the appalling crimes, including murder, committed by those she interviewed, yet, to a person, she asserts that her subjects were “both perpetrators and victims” of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that defined their formative years. Shawn, for example, was born to a mentally ill woman who had been raped by an orderly in her treatment institution. After being separated from his physically abusive mother as a 13-month-old, Shawn would spend years enduring bullying, malnutrition, and sexual abuse in foster care, and he would eventually stab a man who had preyed upon him to death. Each of the interviewees have stories as harrowing as Shawn’s, which makes the book an often-difficult read—but what stands out amid the work’s gory, trauma-filled details is Smith’s insistence on the “shared humanity” of each interviewee.

The book’s narratives are compelling and are balanced by the author’s expert analysis. A retired clinical professor and associate dean of the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, Smith is also the former chair of the L.A. County Commission for Children and Families. Her professional bona fides give the work authority, as does a multipage scholarly references section. Smith follows best practices in social and behavioral sciences by providing detailed explanations of her interview protocols and data tables of evidence collected in her interviews. She also offers poignant reflections on methodological issues rarely discussed in detached academic studies; she highlights the contrast between her own background as a middle-class white Jewish woman with the Black and Hispanic backgrounds of her hypermasculine interviewees, and she’s candid about how differences in race and gender affected her meetings (she also shares her personal history as an activist whose parents narrowly escaped Nazi Germany). The book concludes with a chapter-length exploration of the ways in which the author’s findings can provide a “Path to Healing.” Early intervention for children with ACEs is highlighted, but for those who have already committed crimes, Smith offers a path toward “accountability, freedom, and reparative acts” that reveal “the resilience and transcendent power of the human spirit.”

A well-researched, insightful case for the redemptive power of healing.