No Matter How Loud I Shout (7 page)

C
ARLA,”
Sharon Stegall is telling a visitor—right in front of the girl, as if she weren't in the room listening, “is what we're facing more and more these days. It's one thing to have kids who screw up because that's all
they got to do, 'cause they have nothing at home, nothing at school, nothing but the streets and the homies and time to kill, no pun intended. But Carla”—Sharon pauses long enough to aim a measured glower directly at the girl sitting and fidgeting before her—“Carla has everything going for her. Good family. Nice home. Good grades. People who care about her, love her. And she still screws up. Now why is that, Carla?”

Carla meets her probation officer's eyes with a steady, even stare—no easy feat when the PO is Sharon Stegall, a large and intimidating woman well practiced at putting kids on the spot, who speaks with a gale-force delivery that paralyzes most delinquents. The judges in Juvenile Court may issue the orders, but it is up to the probation officers to enforce them, and Sharon is among the best. But, in that moment, Carla looks unafraid, wearing the unwavering expression of someone telling the truth—or of an extremely practiced liar.

“Aw, Ms. Stegall,” the girl says quietly. “You know I'm straight now. Just ask at my school. I'm doing great.”

“Oh, I'm sure you're running the place, as usual,” Sharon says, shaking her head. “But what else are you running down, that's the question?” The probation officer earns a sly smile with that one, then turns away again, speaking about Carla in the third person once more, a deliberate tactic of intimidation. “If we can figure out how to deal with the Carlas of the world, we will have juvenile crime licked. It's that simple. But I'm not sure we can get through to this knucklehead. Not sure at all.”

Carla rolls her eyes and laughs, running her fingers through her long hair, pushing it away from her eyes. The gesture reveals a place where her tanned skin is marred by a large scar in the center of her forehead. She got it when her head plunged through the windshield of a stolen car. The car had crashed while she and two homies, pursued by police, fled the scene of a drive-by shooting in which Carla had pulled the trigger (in court, Carla denied being the shooter, but later admitted to it in casual conversation). Had the bullet from her gun struck a human target, rather than glancing off a light standard and fragmenting into relatively harmless shrapnel, she would not be sitting and jiving with her PO about going straight. She would be facing a murder rap, her last chance used up.

But sitting here in Sharon's cubicle, beneath the Emancipation Proclamation poster and the enormous wall map with its pushpins showing the multitude of gangs that seem to carve the LA landscape into as many turfs as voting precincts, Carla looks and sounds for all the world like someone you would want for a baby-sitter. She instills that good gut feeling you
need to have in someone before you entrust your most precious possession in the world, your child. And that trust would not be misplaced: Within a certain context, Carla is caring, loving, dependable, and courageous. That this same girl could point a .357 Magnum at somebody and pull the trigger without remorse is the maddening contradiction of Carla James. She is on the leading edge of two new and disturbing trends in Juvenile Court. She is part of a still-small but rapidly growing group of girls who commit violent crimes, once the exclusive domain of the boys. And she is part of a growing legion of kids whose criminal roots cannot be traced to any sort of abuse or deprivation, children who have potential, privilege, and solid families, yet take a turn toward darkness simply out of personal choice, who have the insight and ability to reflect about the immorality of what they are doing, then do it anyway. These are the kids who have Sharon Stegall and the rest of the juvenile justice system stumped—and scared.

And, like many of them, Carla is down to her last chance.

·  ·  ·

She would say she was going to the library to study. Or to her friend Laura's house to do homework. Or to soccer practice after school. And then Carla's mom would find out that the library was closed that day, or that there was no soccer—or no Laura. “I'll see you for dinner,” Carla would say, then vanish until nine at night.

Somewhere between elementary school and middle school, somewhere around Carla's thirteenth birthday, the lying started. The coming home late from school. The hanging on the street corner. The holiday snapshots in the James family photo album show this transformation starkly: one Christmas, there's Carla with her two older sisters and two younger brothers, the kid in the middle with the glowing smile, the perfect clothes, the limitless future. A year later, there's this sullen, defiant stranger in bagged-out gangster clothes, forty-inch trousers hanging from her twenty-four-inch waist, all her old friends forsaken in favor of a new, dangerous, loutish crowd.

It was tough for Carla's mother to get a handle on her daughter. The girl had always been closer to her father. Unlike her older sisters, Carla had resisted her mother's attempts to interest her in Barbies and playing house and wearing dresses. Carla insisted on playing stickball and marbles and cards and whatever the boys on her street were playing. She took great pride in the fact that most of her friends were boys, not girls, and that she met them on their own terms: She threw a ball as good as any boy, she ran as fast as any boy, and she'd fight them ferociously if they ever questioned
her ability or mettle because of her sex. Her mother fretted over this, but her father always told her she could be anything she wanted—and that she should not take any crap from little boys. Carla worshipped him for this. She was his little sidekick, working on the car, mowing the lawn, walking to the hardware store to mess with the bins of bolts and nuts and tools: If Dad was doing it, Carla wanted to do it.

His death in a car accident when she was nine devastated Carla, leaving her depressed and withdrawn for many months, then resentful of her brothers, sisters, and mother when they picked up the pieces of their lives and tried to move forward. In later years, once she became an initiate of the system and heard various counselors and POs theorize about her “antisocial tendencies,” she began to blame her delinquency on her father's death. Parroting the pronouncements of various professionals she met along the way, Carla would say she never got over the grief of losing him, or the anger she felt at being deserted by the person she loved most in the world.

It seems a convenient explanation, but, in truth, this is just Carla giving the professionals what they want to hear, an excuse that does not match the facts. Carla's defiance at home and criminal behavior in the streets did not begin until nearly four years after her father's death. That was the year Carla turned thirteen and her body stopped looking like a boy's. That was the year her mother found a second husband who suddenly moved into Carla's world and expected to be treated like a father.

And that was the year Carla started coming home late from school, detouring past the corner where the hoods from the Tepa-13 street gang hung out. Carla got her first tattoo that year, a bright red heart on her rear end—a secret she managed to keep from her mother for two years. At age thirteen, Carla began leading two lives, with one—that of the young, dangerous, don't-care-if-I-die-tomorrow gangbanger—gradually edging the honors student toward extinction.

It took a while for the adults in Carla's life to realize her new behavior was more than mere teen angst. Both her stepfather and her mother worked long hours that kept them both out of the home a great deal of the day. By the time they concluded something was seriously wrong with Carla, she had graduated to frequent fights and suspensions at school, plummeting grades, and outright defiance when they tried to discipline her. Every time her mother tried to crack down, Carla ran away. During one three-day refusal to come home, Carla escalated her flirtation with the gang life. She jumped into the Tepa gang.

“Jumping in” is a literal term: to pass muster with the gang, she had to stand a minute fighting with several gang members, showing her worth, her courage, her ability to take pain. It is a standard initiation rite of street life, mirrored by an even more brutal “jumping out” ordeal. Normally, girls only have to fight girls, but Carla made it clear she intended to hang with the boys. That meant a double rite. First she had to take on three girl members of Tepa at once, which she did in such a wild and fearless way that she ended up landing more punches than the three of them combined. She sneered at her combatants when it was over and called them weak, sending two of them home in tears. Then Carla withstood a minute-long beating from two male members of Tepa, standing her ground, throwing solid punches of her own and shedding no tears even as blood streamed from her nose and her left eye swelled shut. She could hear some of the guys watching and muttering “Damn!” and she knew she had won their respect that day, the only coin of the realm that matters in a gang.

In short order, the same natural talent for making herself indispensable that had worked so well for her in school made her a popular leader within the gang. Smart, quick, a good planner, Carla found even older members of Tepa asking what she thought of some plan or plot. The power was intoxicating, something akin to being a general with an army to command. The fierce code of loyalty between gang members, and the sense of security and contempt for outsiders it breeds, became the center of Carla's life after that. And any guy in Tepa who forgot himself and spoke to her as if she were different or less worthy or, God help him, coddled or touched her in a way that suggested he might be aware of what lay beneath her gangster baggies, then that boy soon found himself flat on his back, Carla's knees on his chest and her fists drawing blood.

A new world opened up for her then. With Tepa, like any gang, the rules were clear. You knew what was right and what was wrong: You stood up for your homeboys, you showed them loyalty and respect and they gave the same to you. You never showed cowardice, and you never backed down on a point of honor. Disrespect demanded a quick and violent response. “No one tells you these things,” Carla says now. “You just know them in your gut. You know what is right and wrong. And if you didn't know them, you didn't belong there in the first place.”

No one had to tell Carla what to do when members of another gang drove by and peppered a group of Tepa homeboys with bullets, wounding one kid, Carla's friend (who recovered, killed a sixteen-year-old boy in revenge, and went to the Youth Authority). “He was my dog. He was my
tight. I ran the streets with him. I had to do something.” It was Carla who grabbed a gun—there were always guns, communal property passed from gang member to gang member—and who headed to a car with another girl and a homeboy. The guy tried to take the gun from her, but Carla refused. “If I'm going to do a drive-by, I'm going to do the shooting,” she would later explain, as if discussing the advantages of playing left field over right field in baseball. “If we're going to get caught, you know, I want to get caught doing something worthwhile. Not some chickenshit murder charge just because I'm sitting in the car when the gun went off. Why go down for that? Might as well do the shooting.”

Carla claims she shot someone that day, though friends wonder if this is mere boastfulness. She says the boy who was struck survived and recovered. She was never caught or charged with this crime, though she almost died that day. After emptying her revolver at a crowd of rival gang members, a barrage of bullets slapped into the car inches from her as they sped off. The other girl in the car crossed herself, thanking the Virgin Mary for protecting them, but it had never occurred to Carla that she would be struck down. She still doesn't really believe it's possible—Carla says she is too smart to be killed. After the drive-by, she stayed out all that night with a small garrison of gang members, hunkered down outside a homeboy's house, waiting for a retaliation that never came. Then she went home, showered, and went to school. Feeling calm, justified, moral, honorable. And thrilled.

She was at the time one month shy of her fifteenth birthday.

Carla still put on a good front at school, still was capable of excelling when she wanted to, still worked extra hours in the office to curry favor, though now it was as much to cover her new deficiencies in class as anything else, the result of more time on the corner, less with the books. At home, the pretense slipped away. She openly defied her mother, she treated her stepfather with studied rudeness, she refused to observe anything like a curfew, much less quit her gang associations. She stayed out for days at a time. The counselor at her middle school who had befriended her tried to help, seeing the girl's future withering daily, but she was as powerless as Carla's parents to stop the running away, the truancy, the refusal to obey.

In years past, Juvenile Court routinely reined in children like Carla early on, before they committed any serious crimes. Running away, incorrigibility, truancy—they are known as “status offenses,” because they affect only a person whose status is as a minor, a child. Part of the logic used at
the turn of the century to justify creating a separate juvenile court, and to stop imprisoning ten-year-olds side-by-side with forty-year-olds, lay in the acknowledgment that children are different from adults and therefore should be held to different standards. Not only would the sentences be different, but the offenses themselves would stand apart, too. Under that theory, running away or disobeying one's parents or skipping school could be crimes in a juvenile court, even though adults could not be prosecuted for identical conduct. Indeed, such offenses made up the bulk of juvenile court cases during the first half of the twentieth century. And as public policy, it makes perfect sense, because the experts knew in 1905, as they do now, that this sort of misbehavior is in virtually every case the precursor of more serious crimes, Carla being just one of countless examples. It is almost impossible to find a juvenile who committed a serious crime today who did not first commit a passel of status offenses. Going after status offenders and putting them under rigorous supervision or even imprisonment proved to be an effective crime prevention tool in juvenile courts nationwide, stopping many kids from committing worse crimes. Carla would have been a perfect candidate.