A Beautiful Pain is the story of one Black boy's misguided quest for identity and belonging while navigating through atypical childhood adversities, i.e., poverty, physical and gun violence, social decay and rampant drug use, racially disparate and aggressive policing, and other forms of institutional neglect in the 1980s. At sixteen, Damon Venable, when encountering the New Jersey criminal legal system, which cared less about what he thought and felt or made him into a violent  juvenile offender, was sentenced to fifty years to life in prison.  TO PURCHASE THE BOOK PLEASE GO TO: https://transformativereentry.com/