Dickensian horrors: The juvenile detention center in The Car Thief

The 2nd (of 4?) sections of Theodore Weesner's The Car Thief (1972), Detention, finds the protagonist, Alex Hausman, in a juvenile detention facility near or in Detroit (or Flint?), Michigan; Alex was picked up on a string of car thefts (obviously); he's one of the oldest boys in the facily, at 16, and one of the few white boys in residence. He's pretty much a model "inmate," working reasonably hard at the chores, not getting into trouble. He's challenged to a fight at one point by a guy on his unit who talks tough; Alex is stronger and more adept than we would have thought, and the tough-talker turns out to be not much of a fighter - they reconcile afterwards (though Alex remains afraid of a knife attack). He flifts with a young girl inmate while they're both on kitchen duty - but she's caught and reprimanded. Mostly, he thinks about his younger brother, recalls with guilt some nasty tricks he'd played on the boy - one in particular in which he left him alone after school and didn't get home by dark on his own, leading to a frantic search involving the police. Alex also remembers living in a boarding house when his mother had left and his father was unable to handle the two boys - but despite these hardships he was treated well by adults. The core of this section is the detention center itself. Though the boys (and girls) are kept relatively safe, the scene recalls some of the worst work-house Dickensian horrors of Victorian England - the kids are pretty much just pent up; their education essentially stops, they have limited contact with the outside world, know nothing about their cases or their likely future, and have little to do other than chores, some of them pretty nasty. At one point the boys on Alex's unit received a donated box of books. Alex is apparently the only one truly able to read a book; he picks one at random and is mesmerized, as well as proud of himself for actually reading something other than schoolwork. We see a glimpse there of a future Alex - and maybe a future Weesner. I have no idea how much if any of this novel is autobiographical, but the punk's recovery through literature sounds like an autobiographical strand - this doesn't feel like a researched novel so much as a painful remembrance and recollection. Alex as a protagonist, howeve,r remains opaque - we don't know or understand exactly why he embarked on such a reckless course of action - other than a cry for attention? But in pieces, as the story progresses, we learn more about his early life, and the full picture may come together by the end.