Request #272 From Zac

If you can help me out on finding a book from my middle school/high school days (06-13) that would be great.  What I can remember is the book follows a teenage boy who’s older brother is released from jail and comes back home. The brother pleads that he is innocent, and that he shouldn’t have been in jail. The ending sticks out most to me, as the older brother commits a similiar crime to what he went to jail for, the little brother sees him for who he truly is, and the older brother escapes the town via like a raft on a river, and the little brother is sure he won’t survive on the river, and he watches him go/leave. That’s all I have. I have been searching for this book for a long time, and I have even purchased books I believed were it, just to figure out it wasn’t