No Matter How Loud I Shout (26 page)

Now here he is staring out a very different window with a different sort of eagerness, looking for a handicapped little girl who depends on him and loves him and thinks he is the best thing that ever happened to her. He had made fun of the stupid bus the first time he had to get on it, this rolling box the color of a highway stripe, tiny and cramped with too many kids—not a proper ride for a gangbanger of his distinction. At first, he had made fun of the school for geeks and retards the bus brought him to for two hours every morning. What did that DA and that Juvenile Court judge think they were doing, sending someone like him to such a place? Andre knew things about life and death and respect, he had seen young men die, blood running across hot summer cement. He had a record for multiple car thefts and high-speed chases, and he had done worse things, suspected but never charged. He had “made his barrio”—joined its preeminent gang—and he had the tattoos on his arms and his back to prove it. At sixteen, he had juice. What could be accomplished by sending him to this school for the handicapped? It wasn't right.

Then, gradually, unexpectedly, something happened. These kids in the special school weren't geeks after all, Andre began to see. They just needed someone. They needed him. And that was a whole new thrill for him, better than gangbanging or G-rides or ditching school, something he could feel proud of. At home, he found himself talking about Miriam and the other
kids he helped walk and dress and take to the bathroom or the supermarket or clothes shopping. He started defending them against slurs from his homeboys, looking for little gifts to bring them, anything to make them smile. He began to like going to Miriam's school, looking forward to it each morning. Now it is going back to the One-ways, back to
la vida loca
that he dreads.

It has taken a long time for him to admit this even to himself. But, gradually, his clothes changed, from a banger's baggies to button-down shirts and crisply pressed black dress slacks. He has stopped smoking and drinking and carrying guns. He sneaks away from his friends to study college applications, dreaming of a future, any future. To his teachers' and probation officer's surprise, he has changed—precisely at the time the system was preparing to give up on him. After all, none of the usual stuff had worked—arrests, detention, probation, and camp hadn't put a dent in his destructive course. Going to this school that forced delinquents to care for disabled children had been an afterthought. No experts or studies or committees had produced the program—it had been cobbled together by two dedicated teachers sick of failure and bureaucracy, and who sensed power in this melding of one child's helplessness with another's lack of purpose. One more crime, and his next stop would have been prison, but something about this little wheelchair-bound girl has reached Andre instead. The system has won, not with jail cells or boot camps or harsh new laws, but with a young street tough spoon-feeding a little girl with cerebral palsy, a girl whose eyes at the end of the day are filled with love.

“Hey, Miriam!
Qué pasa
?” Andre cries as he jumps off the bus and jogs around several other boys to the little girl's side.

“Andre, Andre,” she chants as he kisses her right cheek. “Rock and roll!”

“Rock and roll, Miriam,” he agrees, then pushes her off to class with a quick glance back at the bus, wishing it would leave and not return, but knowing it will—and that he'll be back on board in two hours. In two hours, he knows, he'll be on his way back to the One-ways. Then the pressure will return, pressure for him to change back into something else, the homeboys coming by, calling him a pussy, telling him to get down and become, once again, what the judges and the cops and the probation officers say he should not be. The people in court make change sound so easy. They don't have to live in his world, where gang membership is for life, and quitting can have fatal consequences.

But today, now, he has two hours. And Miriam.

S
UDDENLY,
this year, everyone is a reformer.

Until now, Juvenile Court in Los Angeles, like the rest of California and most of the nation, has remained essentially unchanged for thirty years, except for laws that ship more children to adult court—which is not so much an advance as a return to an earlier practice.

Now, though, an extraordinary lineup of interest groups, politicians, and lobbyists wants to remake the system. After decades of treating juvenile justice like an unwanted stepchild, with its cast-off facilities, green attorneys, overloaded probation officers, and dyspeptic budgets, suddenly, the policy-makers are wondering aloud why juvenile violence is accelerating at three times the rate of adult crime, and how it is that the Juvenile Court isn't coping. Suddenly, the competition is on to find the Big Fix.

This abrupt realization of what seemed profoundly obvious to the juvenile system's insiders—who have complained for years without effect—seems to have swept the nation more or less simultaneously in the nineties. Major reforms of the juvenile system have begun springing up in most states.

The urge to fix the system seems to have hit with particular intensity in Los Angeles this year. The competing factions of reform are already grappling like rival gangs struggling for turf: Judge Dorn, for one, is assembling his own task force, working to build an odd little shadow court operating under its own rules and priorities within the larger Los Angeles system, focusing on the minor offenders the rest of the Juvenile Court tends to ignore. For him, Juvenile Court is the last, best engine of social change, one that can be made lustrous again with just a few commonsense improvements.

The governor of California, meanwhile, who has presided over a budget-busting program of prison construction (operating expenses: $3.8 billion a year and growing), is pursuing exactly the opposite course, backing a passel of new laws to fill the adult courts and adult penitentiaries with kids. To him, Juvenile Court is a dysfunctional relic that allows young predators to sneer at justice and kill with impunity—a law-and-order position that dovetailed nicely with his newly minted presidential aspirations.

The Los Angeles County Probation Department has its own separate initiative under way, an attempt to turn its harrowing study of repeat offenders (and its finding that the Juvenile Court is statistically irrelevant in stopping crime) into a useful new tool. By constructing a detailed profile of repeat offenders, the department hopes to learn how to spot and help the worst delinquents
before
they become the worst—a promising idea
with some difficult ethical dilemmas attached, not the least of which is the notion of going after kids for crimes they
might
commit down the line. If it works, though, it could lead to a system that heads off delinquency before most kids ever reach Juvenile Court—a planned obsolescence everyone could welcome. Or, at the least, the fruits of this study would justify a reordering of priorities within the Juvenile Court, so that first-time offenders would be dealth with decisively, rather than being handed free pass after free pass until someone ends up hurt or dead.

And then there is the Los Angeles County District Attorney's initiative, the one effort that could make or break the juvenile justice system once and for all.

In the midst of the Ronald Duncan murder trial, and all that the Thirty-one Flavors case illustrates about the state of juvenile justice in America, Peggy Beckstrand has been summoned to a meeting with her boss. DA Gil Garcetti is assembling all his supervising juvenile prosecutors from each branch of the court to discuss a new attempt to sweep the juvenile slate clean. This, by far, is the most ambitious and far-reaching of California's juvenile reform efforts, with allies in the state capital ready to join with Garcetti to fashion new legislation that would shut down every Juvenile Court in the state and replace it with . . . something new. No one as yet is quite sure what that new something will be, other than it must go far beyond mere piecemeal tinkering with the existing system. It must be a wholesale, start-from-scratch remake that could build on what the governor and Judge Dorn and the Probation Department are doing, or discard these efforts entirely for a new system no one has yet fully envisioned. Garcetti is pushing for a statewide task force to study how to do this, drawing on experts from every side of the system, adversaries and allies alike, with the mission of rewriting the juvenile code start to finish.

“And that's what we're here to discuss,” Garcetti tells Peggy and her seven counterparts from the other Juvenile Court branches he has gathered together for this meeting. “You know the system better than anyone.”

Garcetti is a tall, thin, flush-faced man elected two years earlier to replace an unpopular predecessor he once served as a top deputy. The job makes him the most visible DA in America, thanks to Michael Jackson, the Menendez brothers, O. J. Simpson, and Court TV. But along with the glitz, he has inherited a massive operation with a ravaged budget, depleted morale, and a reputation of not being able to win the big one, having lost a series of widely publicized cases, from the McMartin preschool molestation case, to the Menendez brothers parricide mistrial, to the prosecution
of the cops who beat Rodney King, to the never-prosecuted child molestation investigation of pop superstar Jackson. In the midst of what would eventually become the biggest loss of all, the Simpson case, he has decided the legacy he really wants to leave behind is in the long-neglected arena of juvenile justice.

To his credit, Garcetti has been doing considerable legwork for a man holding one of LA's top political offices, talking to judges, lawyers, child development experts, and, most unusual for a prosecutor, to some of the kids his office has put in Juvenile Hall. Prosecutors are not known for listening to what criminals have to say, but Garcetti realized that kids could tell him about the system from the inside. This led him to a particularly edifying—and unnerving—question-and-answer session with some of the kids in Unit K/L at Central Juvenile Hall, where most of the writing class lives.

The kids don't often get a chance to talk to someone with real power (there are their judges, of course, but they are viewed as robed symbols far beyond reach, “looking down on me like some great white god,” one of the kids wrote in class) and the questions flowed. Why is everyone afraid of us? Why do they want to lock us up with adult criminals? Why does everyone think, just because you belong to a gang, that you're a criminal? But it was something one of the younger boys said that stuck with Garcetti long after he left the hall, a little kid who kept asking about murder. He was fourteen years old, though to the DA the kid looked eight or nine, smooth-faced and angelic—which made him all the more frightening to behold.

“If I kill someone,” the kid asked, “can I go to the gas chamber?”

When Garcetti said no and turned to another boy, the same fresh-faced kid persisted. “Even if I kill more than one person? They still have to let me go when I'm twenty-five?”

“That's right. That's what the law requires. For now. That's probably going to change, though.”

“But right now, even if I kill ten people, they can't send me to the gas chamber, they have to let me go?”

Garcetti changed the subject then, but the encounter stayed with him, and he tells his juvenile prosecutors about it, how it hit home to him that kids at every level of the system know the Juvenile Court often can't touch them. “You talk to youngsters,” he says later, “and they tell you, repeatedly, that they got away with so much—that they commit crimes, but aren't arrested, or if they are arrested, when they are brought into court, nothing happens. That's common knowledge. If you expect that, that you can get
away with a helluva lot, that affects your behavior. You start making the kinds of calculations this boy in Juvenile Hall was making. Or you don't even think about the consequences at all, because they don't matter. . . . That's why I want fully dedicated, full-time experts on this task force, nothing less. I don't want to do this half-ass. It's just too important.”

That, he tells Peggy and her colleagues, is what today's meeting is about—he wants to pick the brains of the juvenile DA supervisors. “I want your input,” he tells them. “We're wiping the slate clean. You are the emperor. What would you do?”

To Peggy and the other frustrated supervisors of juvenile prosecutions, who see their cases dismissed, mishandled, and mistried on a daily basis, this question is like asking a kid what kind of chocolate she likes. Not since Juvenile Court first was conceived at the turn of the century to stop the imprisonment and execution of children alongside adults has the stage been set for a top-to-bottom rethinking of how to treat delinquents. The suggestions start coming rapid-fire: Lower the fitness age. Alter the burden of proof to make it easier to convict. Create a two-tier system, one for wayward kids, and one for the thugs and the killers where punishment, not rehabilitation, is the goal. As the suggestions roll in, Garcetti sits back and says little else, content to take notes on a yellow legal pad as his experts in the field warm to the subject.