No Matter How Loud I Shout (36 page)

Back at the hall to await his now inevitable sentence, Elias admits to Sister Janet he deliberately sabotaged himself at CYA, wanting to end up in prison so he could hunt down and exact revenge upon a killer. Just before leaving for CYA, he had learned that his beloved grandmother, who raised him and who tried, if unsuccessfully, to shield him from older uncles and cousins who led lives of crime, had been murdered by an in-law. All he could think about was finding and killing this man—especially after probation authorities refused to allow him to marry the teenaged mother of his daughter, Ashley, in a Juvenile Hall ceremony. These two back-to-back events had devastated Elias, capping a year and a half of tragedy in his life that began with a friend shot to death outside school, a boy who crumpled to the sidewalk and died in Elias's arms. A short time after that, Elias's best friend died in a drive-by shooting outside a convenience store. Just before his arrest, Elias's infant nephew succumbed to crib death (Elias memorialized him by having “Baby Stevie” tattooed on the back of his neck). Then came the night of robbery and murder that put him behind bars.

Too late, he has realized just how irrational it was to think he could go to prison and find his grandmother's killer. California has dozens of prisons and 120,000 inmates, more than any other state, more than most nations of the world. He would never see his grandmother's killer. All he had done was make things infinitely worse for himself, and for his family. Instead of a youth facility near Los Angeles—and near his daughter, his one remaining connection to the outside world unsullied by gangs and crime—Elias could well be sent hundreds of miles away.

·  ·  ·

Geri Vance has an entirely different experience during his ninety days. He goes to Norwalk determined to shine, knowing he is about to have what amounts to an audition—one that will determine the course of his life. It
pays off: He earns excellent reviews from his caseworker and the team that analyzes him. They say they have no doubt that he would benefit from serving his sentence in a juvenile facility, and that he shows more promise and interest in reform than at any time in his life.

Geri returns jubilant, but with his own mixed reviews of the CYA system. He enjoyed the privileges there that outstrip those available in Juvenile Hall—the right to avoid school, to have radios and cassette players in your room, the ability to watch more television. But he also witnessed beatings and gang fights. There were several stabbings and assaults. He says he overheard two boys being raped in his unit during his three months there, crimes that were never reported to the staff—the prison code of silence and the mortal dangers squealers can face firmly in place. As in adult prison, kids are pressured to join gangs to avoid being preyed upon. The CYA corrections officers are armed with burning pepper spray to quell disturbances, and an incapacitating tear gas developed for the military called CS. (Indeed, some facilities have tear gas dispensers for mass spraying installed in their exercise yards to quell riots; more than twenty-seven hundred kids are sprayed a year at CYA facilities.) Whenever kids resist orders or threaten violence, an in-house team of burly corrections officers the kids call the “Ninja Turtles” because of their stocking masks come charging in and physically restrain the offenders. “Someone always ends up in the infirmary with something broken when they come,” Geri tells the writing class upon his return.

“After a while, you start to see, everyone's just hanging out, they don't want to go to school, things pop over every little thing. The racial tension is tremendous. And if you don't hang with your own, the word gets around like that. You get a jacket, and it follows you all over the system. Then everyone's after you. So you're gonna have to take a side sooner or later. A coupla years, you can get by. But I'm afraid about staying there too long. How do you keep from becoming a part of it? From becoming institutionalized?” So many of the kids here seem to know this jargonesque word, and to fear it.

His best hope, Geri says, is getting committed to CYA, then transferred to its Ventura facility north of LA, where there is a four-year college program and a facility that tends to be less violent and war-torn by gang strife. Now it's up to his judge.

·  ·  ·

Ventura is also where CYA houses its small population of hard-core girl criminals, and this milder setting is where Carla goes for her three months'
evaluation. (Out of 8,664 CYA inmates, only 282 are girls—a mere 3.2 percent of the total. This male domination of serious juvenile crime is documented in countless studies, including LA's analysis of the Sixteen Percenters, which found that girls make up only 6 percent of the worst repeat offenders.)
⁶

Like Geri, Carla James also impressed the staff at CYA as a good student and worker. But whereas Geri was perceived as a young man genuinely interested in changing his life, Carla came across as less than sincere. “This is a very charming, pleasant, courteous and respectful youngster. She is responsive and cooperative, as nice as any youngster could possibly be, very sweet and personable,” one psychiatrist assigned to her case wrote. But then he continued, “She is not candid, seems to be rather manipulative, and is rather marked in her denials. . . . Carla paints herself as being a follower who allows others to tell her what to do. There may be an element of truth to this. At least it is so when they tell her to do things she wants to do.”

The analysis of Carla, in short, is right on the money as far as Sharon and a few others who know her well are concerned—though it adds nothing that wasn't already clear about Carla for years. And when it comes time to recommend what to do with her, the CYA evaluators are even less helpful. Their suggestions—after three months of supposedly intense diagnostic work, consist of such bromides as:

“She needs to take responsibility for her own choices.”

“She needs to acquire a sense of empathy with those she victimizes.”

“She needs to break off from gang affiliations and from gang-type thinking.”

“She needs to acquire better companions.”

“She needs to learn to become scrupulously honest with other people.”

The conclusion at the end of this laundry list: “She has a long way to go.”

These recommendations are little more than a wish list, and they could apply to just about any delinquent. Included in this prescription are no specific suggestions on how these goals might be accomplished—goals that, taken together, would constitute nothing less than a cure for juvenile delinquency, if not all crime. After all, if every criminal empathized with victims, chose better friends, took responsibility for their lives, and were honest, they would never break the law.

The only concrete recommendation in the report is that Carla should go to a closed and secure facility with a structured program, but one less severe than CYA. In other words, she should go back to camp—which has
already failed to achieve any of the goals the CYA evaluators listed. But it is exactly what Carla wanted to hear.

Not that she would have minded staying at CYA. To her surprise, Carla found her stay in the Ventura institution far less intimidating than the stories she had heard about the place from her fellow gang members, whose experiences were limited to the system's more hard-core male facilities. “There's nothing there that scares me,” she tells Sharon Stegall breezily upon her return, Polinsky's scare tactic having failed miserably. “I can do my time there standing on my head, no problem.”

But Commissioner Polinsky surprises Carla one more time. Left with no usable, practical guidance after the three-month study, he goes on instinct alone, choosing to reject both CYA and camp for Carla. Instead, he sends her to a place called the Dorothy Kirby Center. A small, county-run program, it is one of the few options available in Los Angeles Juvenile Court that falls outside the four basic sentences.

Dorothy Kirby is a secure compound of ten cottages where kids live, work, go to school, and take part in an intensive, daily program of group therapy designed to change their behavior, their aspirations, their ability to imagine the future—to soften them up.

“If they can't do something with you,” Polinsky tells her, “I don't know who can.”

·  ·  ·

Carla must wait two more months in Juvenile Hall for a slot to open up in the small, much-in-demand Dorothy Kirby program (there are one hundred beds in the program, but a demand that could fill a thousand or more). She does not look forward to trading her comfortable position of top dog on her unit at the hall for an uncertain future at Kirby, though nothing can quite stem this girl's confidence and optimism. Though conciliatory during a follow-up visit with Sharon—one of the few people who seems to thoroughly intimidate Carla—the girl tells a different story once her probation officer is out of earshot.

“I think I'd prefer CYA as far as a place to live,” she says after court, relaxing in the dayroom at Juvenile Hall. “Kirby is for psychos, and I'm no psycho. But the thing is, at Kirby, I'll be out in eight months, instead of three years or something at YA. What can happen in eight months?” She sits back and smiles broadly, already anticipating her return to the streets. She knows the juvenile system's secret: Programs like Kirby work only for kids who
want
to change. Otherwise, it's just a detour. “I just have to stay strong,” Carla says.

After months of anticipation, Carla's big move finally comes. Kirby is not what she expected. The county van brings her to a ragged corner of a less than aptly named LA suburb, the City of Commerce, and deposits her at a walled campus of red brick buildings tucked next to a buzzing freeway. Carla gets a small room in one of the ten dormitories at Kirby, a building with a sign that says Amber Cottage, which she shares with nine other girls. Each cottage is named for a gem or semiprecious stone. At Amber, most of Carla's housemates are also gang members—one carjacker, two car thieves, one armed robber, three girls convicted of assault and battery, one probation violator who had her first child at age twelve, and one girl, like Carla, convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, though her offense was very different. (She is a hallucinatory schizophrenic honors student who tried to kill her sister with a machete, then threatened to slit her own throat with the heavy blade before police subdued her with a stun gun. The Dorothy Kirby staff initially declined to accept her, but Judge Dorn, as he often does, ordered them to take the girl anyway.)

Founded in 1961 as the Las Palmas School for Girls, the facility was renamed for its founder and made coed in the seventies, and now houses forty girls and sixty boys in its ten cottages. Every weekday, the Dorothy Kirby one hundred exercise, go to school, make and serve their own meals, and clean house. Then they go to work.

“Work” at Dorothy Kirby means working in group therapy sessions, once a day with a counselor and the other kids in the cottage, plus one night a week with parents, plus regular weekly sessions with visiting psychologists or psychiatrists for individual therapy. Calling this “going to work” is a deliberate choice of terminology with a familiar, though very different, meaning for gangbangers: Embarking on drive-bys, fighting with rival gangs, and pulling robberies and other gang “jobs” are often referred to as “putting in work.”

“But the kind of work we do here,” Rahman Shabazz, the counselor in charge of Amber Cottage, tells his girls, “is a lot harder than anything you've ever done on the streets. Going to work in group takes real courage.”

As a Dorothy Kirby resident, Carla has been temporarily transferred from Sharon's caseload to Shabazz's care—that's how the kids address him, simply as Shabazz. He is a combination social worker–probation officer, as are each of the cottage directors at Kirby, a soft-spoken man with an easy smile that belies a long experience with the streets and its by-products. He comes across compassionate and supportive, and Carla
instantly figures him for a potential ally who will want her to succeed—and who, therefore, would be vulnerable to being conned. Shabazz smiles and nods when Carla tells him how she plans to quit her gang, have her belly tattoo removed, go to college, and become a lawyer. “Sounds great,” he tells her mildly. “Sounds like you got it all figured out.”

“That's right,” Carla says, looking her new PO in the eye. “I do.”

But then Carla begins going to group—going to work—and she finds both Shabazz, as well as the other girls, not so easy after all. They seem ready to call her on her extravagant claims, pointing out that she has made such promises before and failed to carry them out. To her chagrin, the group tries to force her into corners she has never been backed into before. She grows angry and sullen after a few weeks of this, and Shabazz is well pleased at having struck a nerve. It is a pattern he is used to seeing. All the kids come in thinking they can put one over on the staff. Then they get angry when Shabazz pushes them and challenges them, forcing them to see themselves through other perspectives.

“These kids hate that”—he laughs—“because it means they have to be honest with themselves, and that hurts more than a bullet. . . . Here, they think it's going to be easy, that it's no boot camp here. But I make them submit themselves. I test their patience, their tolerance, I watch what they like and what they want to do, and challenge them to work for those things, to think about the future, to make it happen. It's a mental boot camp. Physical hardships don't faze a lot of these kids.” He pauses to tap the side of his head with a long finger. “But challenge them here . . . and you can get results.”

Once this process of criticism and self-examination begins, one of two things happens: A kid shuts down and refuses to work, and they leave Kirby no better off than when they arrived; or they start to see new possibilities—“running a good program,” the kids call it. It's about a fifty-fifty split, maybe a little better, Shabazz figures. And there's always a turning point where—seemingly—he can tell which way it will go for a kid.