No Matter How Loud I Shout (29 page)

It is not until these repeat offenders have reached age fourteen, and have already committed three or more crimes, that the system takes action, meting out harsh punishments, Sukoda has found. Then it is too late for the delinquent, and too late for the people he has victimized. Sometimes through the best of intentions, sometimes through laziness or bureaucratic indifference, the system ends up with kids like Richard Perez, who commit crime after crime until a murder charge stops them.

The answer is to begin working with these kids at a very early age, before their first arrest, Sukoda says. As a theory, this is hardly revolutionary. It has been scientifically established for many years that a child's ability to avoid criminal behavior—his or her morality—is (or is not) locked in by age six, nine at the outside, and cannot easily be altered after that point. By age fourteen, the task is extremely difficult.
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The Juvenile Court, on the other hand, typically meets the Sixteen Percenters for the first time just after they turn fourteen. Then more years pass before the system takes any meaningful action. The criminal mind-set has already been ingrained in many of them by then. And so an ordinary scientific principle becomes revolutionary in practice, because it would mean rethinking the whole notion of juvenile justice. Sukoda believes Juvenile Court must become a last resort rather than the first stop, with a network of probation officers and counselors stationed in schools and community centers to seek out future serious offenders before they break the law, pushing them to voluntarily join programs to help them avoid lives of crime.

Sukoda's study, preceded and replicated by others around the nation,
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has led to a profile of the typical Sixteen Percenter: a kid with poor grades, a single-parent home (more than half of them had parents who were either divorced or never married, and only a quarter of them lived with both their natural parents), drug and alcohol problems, behavior problems at home and in school, and family incomes under twenty thousand dollars, which practically speaking qualifies for poverty in costly Southern California. A little over half of the kids joined criminal street gangs before their first arrest, twice the rate of kids who do not become repeat offenders.
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None of this is particularly surprising—“A good probation officer has known all this on a gut level for years,” Sukoda says—but the statistics can be used to create a kind of checklist. Third- or fourth- or fifth-graders with behavioral problems who match this profile could be put into special classes. Their families could be offered help, counseling, jobs programs. If gang membership is a problem, getting the kid into after-school activities to keep him off the street might be the answer. Judge Dorn's effort to rejuvenate status offenses fits in here, since it tends to pull in far younger kids, well before they commit serious crimes. In just ten months, strictly through word of mouth, more than four hundred parents have marched into court in Inglewood with their out-of-control kids, begging Dorn for help—a sure sign of a huge need. “The point is, to wait until these kids enter the system the old way is to wait until it is too late,” Sukoda says. “We've lost them by then.”

There are a couple of big roadblocks, though: There must be a sure way of identifying these “at-risk” kids without trampling on their civil rights. The probability that checklists, however carefully devised, will be seen as racially, ethnically, or economically biased is already causing turmoil within the Probation Department. Once identified, there must be a sure way of getting the kids and their families to participate voluntarily in special programs, a major obstacle. The glaring Catch-22 of the current system is its inability to order anything until after a crime is committed. And one of the hallmarks of these kids and their families is parental disinterest and refusal to acknowledge the existence of a problem—making voluntary programs a tough sell.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle, in Sukoda's view, is the simple reality that programs that punish are far more popular than those that prevent. Changing the system's course now would cost money, lots of it, without any immediate results. Ten years down the line, juvenile crime may recede under Sukoda's plan, but it would call for political and economic commitments no one wants to make. On the other hand, if you build a prison cell today, then fill it, the results appear immediate, even if crime continues unabated.
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In mid-1994, shortly after Sukoda presented a progress report on his study to Judge Dorn and other would-be reformers, Los Angeles County discovered it was going broke. The county government had exhausted its credit (it even mortgaged its courthouses) and could no longer continue a long-standing practice of quiet book-juggling and deficit-spending that had for years concealed a growing financial crisis. The order went out: Public safety (read: police and jails) must be preserved, but social programs must be cut. Prevention programs have to be shelved, including Sukoda's plans, it was decided. He could keep studying and recommending, but the likelihood of anything happening became nil. Probation caseloads would go up, therapeutic facilities would shut down—the focus of the system would have to remain on protecting society from the hardcore, dangerous few, with even less left over for the first-time offenders who could still be straightened out.

Just when the Sixteen Percent Solution study made it clear why the system isn't working, the very priorities that have made the Juvenile Court an endangered species got locked into place.

I notice Elias is missing when the writing class starts this night. The other kids tell me he is in The Box. A race riot swept through the Juvenile Hall school earlier today, black kids fighting brown kids, a pattern that has been occurring with alarming frequency in the other juvenile halls, in the Youth Authority, and on high school campuses throughout LA. Word among the staff and kids alike is that the Mexican Mafia is behind it, ordering a select few troublemakers to fan the warfare between the rival ethnic gangs. What started this particular melee remains in dispute—my students say someone suddenly yelled out, “Beaners suck,” after which fists, then chairs, started flying. Others remember a slur against African-Americans as the original source of trouble. However it began, the ending was predictable and unambiguous: five or so staff members waded in and grabbed the combatants within reach. Elias had visibly participated in the fighting and already had a reputation as a troublemaker. He was an easy choice to serve as an example.

I ask the kids what it's like in The Box.

“It's like, if you were already worried that the rest of the world forgot where you are and who you are, The Box makes you sure of it,” Geri says. “The only thing you can do in there, you know, is think—usually about how bad things are.”

“Sometimes,” Scrappy adds quietly, “the only way you keep from stressing out in this place is to not think. You can't do that in The Box. All there is to do is to think. I hate The Box.”

The Box, I later learn, is a term only used by the kids, more descriptive than the official title, SHU—Special Handling Unit. It is a separate building near the back of the hall grounds, where boys and girls are kept locked individually in bare rooms without anything to read or do for much of the day. It is juvenile solitary confinement.

Normally, visiting privileges are canceled once a kid is in The Box. But the hall's Catholic chaplain, Sister Janet, has ways of getting around the rules and she manages to see Elias while the rest of us are in class. She knows he is facing a difficult decision.

“My lawyer tells me I should take a plea bargain,” Elias tells her after they sit down. He puts his head down on folded arms on the tabletop and closes his eyes. “My lawyer says he got the best deal he can.”

“I know,” Janet answers. She has been in touch with the boy's court-appointed lawyer, Mike Shannon, since Elias first came here a year ago. Janet wanted to make sure he got the best defense possible, that the attorney assigned to his case understood that, as far as she was concerned, beneath Elias's anger and gang tattoos and criminal behavior, there was something more. Something worth taking time and trouble to salvage. “He's a very good lawyer,” Janet assures Elias, “and a very good man. I'm sure he believes that the plea bargain is what's best for you.”

She doesn't tell him that the lawyer, when talking to Janet earlier in the week, grew so frustrated he was almost in tears over Elias's case. “This sixteen-year-old kid is supposed to decide between going to trial—where he can't win and where he risks getting sentenced to life without parole—and taking the deal the DA's offered, a sentence of fifteen years to life. What kind of choice is that for a kid to have to make? When he gets out, he'll have spent half his life behind bars. But the pressure on the DA to crack down on this case is tremendous. The family of the victim has been relentless. I can't get him a better deal.”

Janet usually avoids asking about the details of crimes—she says she is more interested in dealing with kids' futures than their pasts—but she knows the awful facts that brought Elias to her, that night in Hollywood, when he and a pickup truck full of homeboys and home girls went out on a “mission.” That's what they called their armed escapades in search of robbery victims, heroic terminology borrowed from old war movies by kids at war with the world. There was nothing heroic about it, though, Elias says now—everyone
had been messed up on pot and booze and things had gotten out of hand. They had been stupid and cruel. And some poor innocent on his way home from a convenience store with a carton of milk had died, stabbed on the street and left to bleed to death for a lousy seven bucks.

Elias had been in the truck with the others that night, had agreed they should do the robbery, had helped chase the man down. But then he had stood back. It was three other kids who tackled and robbed the man walking alone on the street. Elias hadn't done the stabbing, hadn't intended it or expected it, had been just as surprised as everyone else when crazy Tyelle pulled out the knife and plunged it into the guy's stomach. Even afterward, Elias never thought the man would die. As they drove away, he saw the victim get to his feet and stagger off, yelling for help. When the police arrested the gang members hours later and told Elias that no one ever came out to help the man, that he had walked around dazed and alone until he collapsed and bled to death, Elias broke down and started weeping uncontrollably in the interrogation room. He swore so vociferously about never meaning to harm anyone that even the detective who booked him for murder believed it. It was this remorse, more than anything, that convinced the prosecutor on the case to offer Elias a plea to second-degree murder and a fifteen-year sentence, which in this age of crime and punishment is considered a most generous offer. The others tried as adults in the case got twenty-five to life.
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“But part of the deal is, I can't get a YA number,” Elias tells Sister Janet. “Only an M number.” He is referring to a loophole in the law that allows adult court judges to sentence deserving kids back into the juvenile system. Kids who are “committed” to the California Youth Authority get a corrections file number that begins with “YA.” Everyone else gets an “M” number, the abbreviation for male convict. The difference is immense. Kids with YA numbers get out at age twenty-five. M numbers do their time—no age limits. And though they can still be housed temporarily in CYA, there are no guarantees for M numbers. The state penitentiary is always right around the corner.

“I don't know what to do, Sister Janet,” Elias says, looking up at her for the first time since she walked in. She sees he has dark circles under his eyes, as if his face were bruised. His arms are thin and his T-shirt hangs loosely—he has lost weight. “I was ready to take the deal the last time I was in court, but then I saw my mother sitting there, and my sisters, and aunts, the whole family. My girlfriend was there with my baby girl Ashley, and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't admit this thing in front of them. I couldn't let them hear me say I am a murderer. They don't think of me that way. I don't think of me that way. So I have another week to decide.”

Sister Janet reaches out and takes his hand, a familiar ache in her chest. She loves these boys, has devoted her life to them, working with gang members in the streets of East LA for years, then becoming their advocate in Juvenile Court and Juvenile Hall. The prosecutors consider them monsters, their defense lawyers can be so jaded and overworked that they barely remember their names, most of them have families who gave up on them long ago, if they have families at all. And so Sister Janet fills the void, the chaplain of the lockup. Gray-haired and soft-spoken, she walks through the hall and even the most hardened gangbangers may drop what they are doing to take her hand or embrace her. She is a nun with a master's degree in filmmaking, who writes screenplays about her boys' lives, who has friends in the film industry, and whose nun's habit long ago was supplanted by smart knit skirts and fashionable business suits. Her quiet caring, her empathy for social outcasts, is unshakable. If racial tensions in the hall are rising, Janet seems to know it first. If there is an escape planned, someone may tell her about it. If a kid's lawyer needs a witness to plead on his or her behalf, Sister Janet is there. She has the Juvenile Hall wired. The kids tell her everything.

“Can you help me, Sister?” Elias asks.

“I'm praying for you, every day,” she answers automatically. “And when it's time to go to court, I'll be there for you. It's not over yet.”