No Matter How Loud I Shout (61 page)

The prosecution offers no testimony to counter the glowing comments from Sister Janet and the others. He merely argues that George, whatever his accomplishments since his arrest, has proven himself to be dangerous, and that returning him to the juvenile system—and the possibility of a much earlier release from custody—would pose a threat to public safety.

“It's clear that whatever's wrong with him will not be taken care of in six months or one year or two years,” the prosecutor says and, sadly, no one in the courtroom can truly dispute this, as it took years to make George what he is today. They can only disagree on who is to blame.

“I am not going to recall my sentence,” Judge Philip Hickok says at the end. “I hope and pray Mr. Trevino has learned his lesson and will become a productive member of society. . . . The sentence will stand. I feel comfortable with what I've done.”

Still, like Geri Vance, Judge Hickok's order allowed George to be housed at the Youth Authority, possibly for his entire sentence, since he can make parole before he hits the age-twenty-five ceiling at CYA. All he has to do is behave. He, too, hopes to earn a college degree while behind bars. He is not nearly so upbeat as Geri, though he has stopped refusing visits and letters from the people he cares about in life. The failed hearing
on his sentence—and the fact that people cared enough to show up and speak out on his behalf—astonished him once he was told about it. “I just can't believe you would all do that,” he tells Janet. He holds the memory close to him, something to cherish, this feeling that he matters to someone, though he still doubts he will ever amount to anything more than a criminal. And yet, a new, fragile optimism creeps briefly into his poetry:

My life has come to

an end, but if I turn

around on the road

again it will begin.

It's up to me to decide

For me to make a selection,

I just hope I get guided

in the right direction.

A few weeks before his transfer out of Central Juvenile Hall to CYA, George had been nominated as the facility's Outstanding Student of the Year. By the time the winner is picked—and George is named first runner-up—he is gone.

A few months later, there is a fight among inmates at the CYA facility where George is housed. He is identified as one of the culprits and transferred to adult prison. For good.

·  ·  ·

Ronald Duncan, kept by the juvenile system only because his birthday saved him by nine days, is in the California Youth Authority, where he will likely stay until age twenty-five. Even so, even though his vicious double murder was far more egregious than Elias's crimes, or George's, or Geri's, Ronald will probably get out before any of them. Only his record will be cleansed and sealed, as if those two murders never happened.

Ronald has never admitted responsibility for the murders. He doesn't have to. The calendar will set him free.

·  ·  ·

Andre, the gangbanger whose conduct and outlook on life was no different or worse than George's or Geri's or Elias's—but who was given a chance by the juvenile system to work with handicapped children and to turn his life around—has left the gang life and the streets behind. He has graduated high school and is going to community college while holding down a job as a clerk for Los Angeles County.

“A person can change,” he says. “It takes guts—and you have to have someone out there willing to help you, to treat you like a person instead of a criminal, someone who believes in you, the way my teachers did—but you can do it.”

Andre isn't sure yet what he would like to do in life. He is only now getting used to the notion that his horizons are bigger than the cramped barrio One-ways of Norwalk. There is one career he is interested in, though something he would never have considered just a few years ago, but which now seems appealing because it would enable him to help people, particularly kids like himself.

He thinks, just maybe, he'd like to be a cop.

·  ·  ·

Carla James also graduated from high school, then left the dismal confines of the South Bay school for good. As planned, she now attends college as a full-time student, and holds down two jobs as well, selling ice cream and hot dogs at a shopping mall. She and her mother are talking more instead of arguing, letting go the old tensions that once filled their home. Carla's little brother is in private school—she made sure he didn't follow in her gangster footsteps. And, after eight months on The Outs, she has stayed straight and clean. She has done so well that her probation officer, Sharon Stegall, is recommending that she be terminated from the Juvenile Court docket, her probation over, her record sealed.

“This was a kid who was always in it because she liked the thrill,” Sharon says. “But I think she's realizing she has half a brain, and that she can accomplish anything she puts her mind to. I'm pretty sure she's going to channel those abilities into legal things from here on out. If not, though, if I'm wrong, well, she's just turned eighteen. Next time, she goes to adult.”

“There won't be a next time,” Carla says. “I know that, for sure. Not that I learned any big lesson from the system, or anything. But I'm older now. I know better.”

Carla, it seems, offers a powerful lesson for the system—and a powerful reason to keep it alive. It is not so much that the Juvenile Court has the power to change kids like Carla. It doesn't, really, though few are articulate enough to make that as clear as Carla does. What the system can accomplish—and what transferring kids to adult court can never do—is to give Carla and others like her the time and opportunity and tools to consider other, more constructive paths in life than gangs and crime and violence. As often as not, kids will choose not to be criminals if given another option—not because they are compelled to do so, but because it makes sense to them.

Carla smiles that big, white smile of hers, eyes crinkling, expression confident and sure, agreeing with this assessment. As always with Carla, it's impossible to imagine this girl hurting someone, pointing a gun at someone, shooting at someone—though there is no doubt she has done all those things in the past, and worse. And even knowing that, it still doesn't seem possible.

“Yeah,” Carla says without a trace of irony. “That's what everyone has always said about me. That's how come I always worked the system, rather than the system working me.”

In the end, though, the result is the same. For all her talk of working the system, and of telling judges and counselors what they want to hear, Carla is straight now. She's on The Outs, and out of trouble. It doesn't matter why, only that it is so. And her mother has no doubt that the Juvenile Court saved Carla's life.

·  ·  ·

A year ago, these seven children found themselves before the Juvenile Court, kids accused of car theft, of murder, of violent assaults, of armed robbery, and of violating probation by skipping school and dressing like a gangster. Three of these kids had been hard-core gang members. Two were very poor, one was very wealthy, the others somewhere in between. The system of juvenile justice, where rehabilitation, not punishment, is—or was—the theoretical goal, was supposed to save them all, or to at least go down swinging.

It saved three. It proved itself impotent before the one remorseless killer among them. And the system gave up on the rest.

There is no easily identifiable reason for these divergent results. There is little logic to Juvenile Court's successes and failures. But for a bit of luck, a chance encounter with a caring judge or probation officer or volunteer—or, conversely, with a tired bureaucrat, an incompetent lawyer, or an inflexible DA—any one of the seven could have traded places with the others. That is the heartbreak of Juvenile Court, the wonder of it, and the scandal. Heartbreak, because every kid cannot be saved. Wonder, that this broken, battered, outgunned system saves even one child. Scandal, because it so seldom tries to do anything at all.

Twenty Years Later

Not long after
No Matter How Loud I Shout
was published, I was surprised to receive an invitation to testify before the US Senate Subcommittee on Children, Youth, and Families in Washington, DC. The subject of the hearing was juvenile crime and reform, by which the senators meant charging, trying, and imprisoning yet more children as adults.

I found myself to be the only journalist in a room full of legal experts, angry crime victims, and scholars, including those who had predicted the approach of a tidal wave of juvenile super predators, who were the “stars” of this hearing. I was in the distinct minority in suggesting that the most effective response to juvenile crime—even a tidal wave of it—might not lie in shifting the lion's share of resources to programs targeting the worst of the worst. Instead, I told the senators about the solution commended to me by most of the cops, prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys I met during my year in the life of juvenile court: that we should be intervening in a big way in the lives of children who are just embarking on criminal
careers—well
before
they become the worst of the worst. We were missing an opportunity, I argued; I'd seen it happen day after day: the nation's juvenile courts were an engine for identifying new small-time offenders, thousands of them every week, who could be stopped from committing more crimes—who could be helped (or at least restrained) before it was too late, whose families and school careers could be revived. But we were doing nothing with them or their families. Instead, we waited for them to commit some truly heinous offense, waited for them to victimize someone terribly, waited for them to become the so-called predators everyone feared. Only then did we spend inordinate amounts of money to imprison them—at a yearly cost greater than tuition at our priciest colleges. The system's priorities were exactly backward: we had a perfectly good smoke alarm in place, but we ignored its warnings until the house burned down. Only then did we turn on the fire hoses.

The senators appeared mildly baffled by this digression from their discussion of the coming super predators who had to be locked away in adult prisons, and how we needed new, tougher, adult tools to battle this mythic foe. And that's when it hit me: based on their puzzled responses, it appeared that few, if any, of these senators had spent even a day—much less a year—watching the juvenile court at work. These men who were determined to fix the system, mostly by tearing it down, seemed to have no idea what it even looked like.

None of the major reforms of the juvenile justice system contemplated during my year in juvenile court ever made the leap from hopeful memo to working reality.

The ambitious Sixteen Percent Solution project, with its aspirations of remaking juvenile court into an engine for prevention and early intervention, came to naught. There was no money and no political will to rebuild the system from the ground up with a solution that did not put adult prison sentences as its priority. After a small pilot study, the initiative ended for good.

Likewise, nothing came of former District Attorney Gil Garcetti's legislatively mandated study of juvenile justice, with its notion of creating a two-tiered system that channeled more offenders directly into adult court while throwing intensive social services at the most promising candidates
for rehabilitation. Declining juvenile crime sucked the wind out of all such reform ideas, whether they emphasized prosecution or prevention.

And then there was Judge Roosevelt Dorn, who vowed to use truancy, running away, and other status offenses, along with an army of empowered parents, to remake the system one kid at time. Try as he might, Dorn could not muster support from his fellow judges to follow his example by opening their courtrooms to parents and wayward kids. Nor would they hammer probation officers into writing more reports and doing more investigations. Nor would they bend the law and run roughshod over prosecutors and defense attorneys to get their way. Dorn was the judge who would be king, but the problem with kings is that they rule alone.

Facing increasing resistance to his policies and his my-way-or-the-highway style, Dorn turned to politics. In 1997, he left the court for good and became mayor of the surrounding community of Inglewood, where his advocacy for kids and parents, and notoriety for doing things his way, made him a popular leader of the city for three terms.

Shocking his supporters—though not the critics of his autocratic approach—a public corruption scandal finally took Dorn down in 2010. The charges revolved around a half-million-dollar low-interest home loan he received from a program operated by the very city of Inglewood he led. Prosecutors leveled felony charges that could have sent Dorn to prison for four years. The judge-turned-mayor always maintained his innocence but ended up resigning his office and pleading guilty to a misdemeanor conflict-of-interest charge. This earned him two years probation and a lifetime ban on holding elected office.

No more would any child be offered a choice between the penitentiary, the cemetery, or Judge Dorn's tough love. His parting words were a shockingly ironic cop-out from a judge who so often imposed his will on others, and who so many times had demanded personal responsibility from the kids, parents, and lawyers who once stood before him: “There comes a time when even the innocent can be forced to take a plea,” he said. “And that's what happened to me.”

One of the great obstacles to an effective Los Angeles Juvenile Court has been a chronic lack of continuity. Kids would be shuttled to court for a crucial hearing and find a strange lawyer, a different judge, or a new
probation officer who didn't know their names, much less their histories. Files would be lost. Vital information would not be shared between the foster care world of dependency court and the criminal world of delinquency court. Kids like George Trevino who could have been saved instead slipped through the cracks—not just their cases but their very lives and fates mishandled and misjudged. And with the regular turnover of presiding juvenile judges who sought more prestigious (or less depressing) assignments, there was a persistent lack of continuity in leadership.