No Matter How Loud I Shout (60 page)

In an office strewn with papers and computer printouts, Roy Sukoda is still working on his Sixteen Percent Study, creating a detailed profile of repeat offenders that is supposed to open a whole new direction for the Probation Department and the Juvenile Court, enabling it to target the kids in need of help before they commit serious offenses, thereby preventing juvenile crime, rather than merely reacting to it. The same study that shows the current Juvenile Court to be statistically irrelevant in stopping youth crime also provides a road map for making the system work far beyond anything imagined before. “We truly believe this is the best hope for the future,” he says proudly. “This has the potential for saving a lot of kids we are not helping now.”

But Sukoda's reports, for the time being, are destined to do little more than collect dust on someone's shelf, profound ideas with no constituency behind them. There is no money to make the enormous changes in the system implicitly called for by his study. Nor is there the political will to hammer through a policy that emphasizes preventing crime over punishing criminals, even though Sukoda's study shows that investing now in a new and better juvenile system would almost certainly save money and prevent crime ten years down the line. The only segment of the California budget that is growing now is the prison budget, a priority that is unlikely to change any time soon.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti won passage of his most prized legislative proposal, a law that creates a statewide task force to reinvent the Juvenile Court in California. But it remains unclear what, if any, impact this task force will have. Already, the outlook is grim. It is off to a poor start, behind schedule and lacking funds to carry out its mandate of finding a way to make juvenile justice work. Even appointments to the task force were made late, and now the group is playing catch-up. There is also the “So what?” factor to deal with: Similar efforts in the past have yielded interesting reports that no one read or acted on. Another recent juvenile task force—created by a respected state watchdog agency called the Little Hoover Commission—spent a year hearing testimony and interviewing experts, then made a series of commonsense recommendations to fix the juvenile justice system in California. These recommendations boil down to three basic overriding proposals: Make prevention and programs for the youngest, earliest offenders the system's top priority, instead of the current balance that spends most of the time and money on older, hardened child criminals. Restore the flexibility and reasonableness the system lost in the wake of the Gault decision that transformed juvenile
into a mini-adult court, with the resulting focus on litigating cases rather than dealing with children. And revamp the system to impose firm, quick, and predictable consequences on misbehavior instead of the current revolving door that allows a child to commit many crimes before facing any meaningful sanction.

Most professionals who labor within the system—and many of the kids who pass through it—agree with these straightforward recommendations. Yet the report has been ignored and even derided as unrealistic. The new state task force created at DA Garcetti's urging faces a similar fate—unless it leans less toward fixing the juvenile justice system, and more toward dismantling it. There is no shortage of support for that approach.

Judge Dorn, meanwhile, stays ensconced at the Thurgood Marshall Branch, and in the absence of any systemwide fix on the horizon, he remains intent upon creating his own program to save both juveniles and the court that serves them. If he cannot save the entire system, then he will remake it within the walls of his own courthouse, where no one can tell him what to do. If the Probation Department is cutting back elsewhere, Dorn makes special orders requiring them to work harder in his courtroom and with his kids. If the police departments give short shrift to juvenile crime, taking weeks to act on arrest warrants issued by the court, he orders police departments to serve Judge Dorn's warrants ahead of all others—and the kid he wants arrested is brought in within a few hours. If efforts to deal with delinquents are fragmented and bedeviled by interagency rivalries, he pressures schools and social service agencies and prosecutors and defenders to meet and find ways to work together.

And if no one else is interested in preventing crime by targeting incorrigible status offenders, then he does it alone. The parents keep flocking to him with their disobedient children, and though the laws says he cannot punish them with stays in Juvenile Hall, he and the other judges at Thurgood Marshall find ways to do it anyway. In chambers, Dorn keeps dealing informally with dozens of status offenders a week. “It is never recorded in court, but they are on Judge Dorn probation nevertheless,” he gleefully tells a conference of cops, lawyers, and probation officers who work with kids.

The public defenders' latest cause for outrage stems from another Dorn policy: He has been taking kids who successfully graduate from camp and sending them to group homes and foster care if their mothers and fathers fail to take court-ordered parenting classes. The judge—and many a lawyer practicing in his court—see this as a tool for improving the home lives
of delinquent children, the surest way possible of stopping a kid from becoming a repeat offender. But critics say Dorn's new ploy is illegal, and amounts to punishing kids for their parents' conduct. Kids end up asking, Why should I try hard and do what the courts and the camps ask, if I'm only going to be punished for something I can't even control?

“There will always be critics,” Dorn scoffs. “They don't want anything to change. They don't care about these children's lives. They don't see that the Juvenile Court is a way to save lives. But I do. And I will never give up on saving children. Never. I will do what is necessary. That is why I am a judge.

“That is why I am here.”

At a winter conference on youth gangs he helped sponsor, Dorn seizes the microphone and walks the stage with the same drama and urgency he uses in church on Sunday. He roundly criticizes many probation officers, juvenile lawyers, and some of his fellow judges for laziness, for failing to give the necessary effort to save kids—and his court—from destruction. He pleads with his audience of cops and counselors and lawyers and POs to support commonsense reforms of the system. He calls for an end to informal, unsupervised probation that does nothing but encourage kids to commit more crime. He begs for a systemwide expansion of his status offender program, with new laws that allow up to a year's detention for incorrigible kids if they fail to straighten up. Parents with kids out of control should not have to come from all over Los Angeles to his lonely courthouse because no one else will help them, he shouts, arms waving. He asks for a Juvenile Court open to the public, and a new law to make possession of a gun by a juvenile a felony, so he can have three years, rather than six months, to work with kids who carry deadly weapons.

“Our children are killing each other on the streets ninety miles an hour. . . . Yet we treat possession of a firearm as a misdemeanor. It is wrong. . . . Why can't we make commonsense changes? It makes sense, doesn't it? There should not be any question on this. But there is.”

Dorn tells his gathering that Juvenile Court ought not be the unwanted, underfunded bottom of the barrel of our judicial system, but its highest priority. Our children—even our wayward and dangerous children—deserve the best, not the least, he says. He wants his audience to rediscover the essential optimism that spawned Juvenile Court in the first place—the notion that society ought to protect and attempt to save children, simply because they
are
children. As Dorn speaks, the judge slowly gives way to the preacher in him, his voice rising, both hands gripping the microphone.
Each time he pronounces a word beginning with the letter
P
, it sounds like a gunshot, so close are his lips to the mike. And this audience of cynical cops and probation officers and lawyers who have seen it all find themselves nodding as if they are Judge Dorn's congregation. Listening to him, they can almost believe again that what they do really
does
matter.

“There may be some individuals who believe this problem we have with our young people is not their problem. . . . Let me tell you, half the kids I get are not from the inner city. They're from Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Rolling Hills. . . . They are all our children. They ARE
OUR
CHILDREN. Unless you believe that, you have no business in the position you're in. Unless you believe we can make a difference, change jobs. . . . Unless we make a difference, you and I cannot be safe in our homes. If we do not make a difference, our society will never be the same.”

Judge Dorn pauses then, breathing deeply, lowering his voice for effect. His audience is rapt now, he is preaching to the choir.

“Let me tell you,” he almost whispers. “We can do it. And we must do it.”

·  ·  ·

Judge Dorn's one-year anniversary back in Juvenile Court also marks one year since Elias Elizondo entered the writing class at Central Juvenile Hall. In that time, having had his minor crimes and gang membership ignored by the Juvenile Court for years, the system transferred him without hesitation or qualm to the adult court once his transgressions were deemed serious enough.

Now he finds himself in a state penitentiary. He is one of 120,000 inmates in California's $3-billion-a-year, twenty-eight-prison corrections system (bigger and more expensive than the U.S. federal prison system, the only state in the Union that can make that claim). By the time his earliest possible parole date comes around in 2002, the state prison population in California is expected to reach 350,000 inmates in eighty-one prisons with an annual cost of $6.8 billion, thanks to new sentencing laws—also adopted in the past year—that require extremely tough prison sentences for more juveniles and for all adult three-time losers.

After being moved several times around the system, Elias has been placed in the notorious Folsom State Penitentiary, one of the roughest prisons in the California penal system, a stronghold for the Mexican Mafia and other prison gangs. Because he was participating in a robbery attempt when a fellow gang member stabbed a man to death, Elias is being treated no differently by the prison system than if he plunged the knife into his
victim himself. There will be no more school for Elias, no attempts to rehabilitate him. He will simply be warehoused with hardened criminals and gangsters, the youngest person on his cellblock, until he finishes his fifteen-years-to-life sentence. He will reach manhood in prison. He will spend most of his twenties there. Then he will return home to be someone's neighbor, someone's employee, someone's uncle, cousin, and father. He will have to find a life, and a way to avoid going back. And he will have to do it on his own.

·  ·  ·

Geri Vance's experience in the adult system has been vastly different. Though sentenced to state prison for attempted murder, Geri was accepted for housing at the California Youth Authority's Ventura School, the youth prison system's finest facility—a beach community paradise compared with some of the barren facilities in desert country that could have claimed him. His counselors at CYA, like those who worked with him at Central Juvenile Hall, feel he has enormous potential, despite the Juvenile Court's decision to give up on him. Ventura is the only CYA facility with a four-year college program. With luck, Geri says, he'll have a degree when he gets out. And his autobiography will be finished.

“Once it's written,” he says, “then I can start my life over. With a new beginning.”

·  ·  ·

After eight months, John Sloan, who avoided adult court for armed robbery thanks to Judge Dorn's refusal to enforce the state's tough fitness law, graduated from probation camp with honors. He has returned home to live with his parents, and is attending Los Angeles City College, earning good grades and pursuing a career in the arts. He is an extremely quiet and withdrawn teenager, reluctant to talk about his experience in the system, or much of anything else, introspective and difficult to read. He is eighteen now, legally an adult, though he remains on juvenile probation. He never sees his probation officer, however; the PO has placed him in a low-risk pool of offenders who need not check in unless there's a problem.

So far, there have been none, as far as the system can tell. And that, by definition, is success in Juvenile Court.

·  ·  ·

Despite the erroneous and incomplete picture painted of George Trevino at his sentencing hearing for the home invasion robbery, his ten-year sentence to adult prison still stands. When I bring his record of achievement and the potential witnesses on his behalf who work at Juvenile Hall to his
court-appointed attorney's attention, the lawyer, William O'Donnell, is at first stunned by the news—“I had no idea,” he says—and two days before the filing deadline expires, he goes to court to ask for a hearing to change George's sentence.

George's principal, his tutor, a volunteer at the hall, and Sister Janet all troop to court and wait in a sweltering, ninety-degree hallway in the Norwalk Branch of the Superior Court, where the air-conditioning only seems to work in the courtrooms and judges' chambers. George doesn't come, and isn't even aware of the hearing. “I didn't want to get the kid's hopes up,” O'Donnell explains, a showing of little confidence not lost on the judge or prosecution.

Despite heartfelt testimony from George's supporters, the hearing is a muddled mess. O'Donnell, rumpled and disorganized and stating in open court that he hopes this will be his last criminal case ever, did not meet with his witnesses until the day of the hearing, and it shows. His presentation is disjointed; his witnesses come across as bleeding hearts blinded by fondness for George. It is never made clear just how misleading and erroneous the probation and CYA reports on George were. This is critical, because these reports helped guide the judge in sentencing George in the first place.