No Matter How Loud I Shout (33 page)

“You gotta be kidding me, Randy,” she shouts. “You come in here like this? Wearing that?” She suddenly pushes her face within inches of the boy's and stares at his eyes, pupils huge despite the bright fluorescents. “And you're high, too, aren't you? Aren't you?”

“No, Ms. Stegall, no, I'm not high. I swear.” The kid is talking a mile a minute, explaining, absurdly serious, that he wore the gang insignia “because I wanted to be honest with you.” In the past, he always took it off for his visits to the cubicle, but that was a form of lying, he says. “I just want you to know what I'm really doin'.”

“What you're doing is standing up. Against that wall,” Sharon yells. She stands Randy up, pats him down, and handcuffs him on the spot. “You have the right to remain silent, do you understand that? Or are you too high?”

“I'm not high, Ms. Stegall, I swear.” But the kid knows it is too late. He wears a stoic, long-suffering expression on his small, smooth face. His ears turn red as Sharon continues her tirade, declaring him in violation of his probation for drug use and gang affiliations. He finally allows that he might have snorted some cocaine, just a little, before coming to his appointment.

“You may not understand this, but I'm trying to save your life. Do you know that?” Sharon says, softly now, intently. “I'm gonna get you off the street and save your life, whether you want me to or not. I'm not gonna have another one of my kids dead. Not today, anyway.”

Then she marches him out to a county car, and takes him to Juvenile Hall.

S
HARON
Stegall's branch of the Metro Gang Unit lies in a cheerless maze of a building surrounded by a huge parking lot set far back from a wretched stretch of Imperial Highway, listing like an abandoned scow in a sea of cracked and glass-strewn asphalt. The Centinela Probation Office, where both juvenile and adult probationers mingle together in a gritty waiting room, abuts a massive county welfare office where long lines snake out the door each day. Not even those crowds can fill the county-owned
parking lot, however, which could serve a moderate-sized baseball stadium. This hulking place and its destitute environs are where the kids who are wards of the Juvenile Court in Inglewood must come. Each day, they fill up the waiting room, teenage mothers and fathers in their gangster baggies and tattoos, many of them hauling babies of their own, some of the infants and toddlers dressed down like gangsters, too.

The location of this probation office is a convenience for the county, not for the kids and their families—it is a long drive from the Inglewood court, a two-bus odyssey for the majority who rely on public transit. The distance provides a built-in, though unintended, incentive for probationers not to show up. Often, newcomers to the court will be told at 11:00
A.M.
to leave Inglewood and to report to their probation officer on Imperial Highway before noon, where they must pick up some crucial piece of paper or provide some critical information in person. When, as is often the case, they cannot make it on time, the probation officer will have already left, and the kid is blamed for violating court orders. Or they come to meet their POs, but must miss school to do so, then get nailed for truancy. This happens daily (except in Judge Dorn's court, where the standing order to POs is to never schedule appointments during school hours, which makes its own set of problems, since probation hours roughly match most schools').

The problem has a simple solution: Move the probation officers. Kids ought to be able to leave a courtroom—or a classroom—and walk down the hall to see their new probation officer, Sharon believes. But such a sensible system has never been considered. It would require an investment of time and manpower the Probation Department increasingly cannot spare. There are probation officers assigned to every Juvenile Court judge, but none of them actually work with kids—they only push papers. They are “liaisons.” Visionaries within this massive system talk about the decentralized probation department of the future, flexible, storefront operations scattered throughout the community, so that POs can once again know their charges, families, and neighborhoods, as was the case in the sixties, when most probation officers had twenty kids to supervise instead of two hundred. But the system has done nothing to address this end other than churn out a mountain of studies and proposals that have all the ingredients for success save one: the money to make them work.
¹

Centinela Probation is part of a tired network of offices spread throughout the Los Angeles area. Here, as elsewhere, the crush of cases is enormous, and kids' files—and the kids themselves—can get lost for weeks on someone's desk. The department is reeling from budget cuts and is in
what seems to many insiders a permanent state of disarray, with the quality of probation supervision not always what it should be. Squabbles and racial divisiveness have at times reduced the department to warring camps, mirroring the ethnic violence that has polarized the juvenile halls and prisons. Even a softball game between different probation offices recently broke down into a black-on-brown fistfight. A full-time committee was created in recent years to circulate through the various probation offices, settling racial disputes among staff members on a regular basis.

Worse still, though the majority of POs seem to do the best they can in coping with a difficult job, the department at times seems incapable of policing rogues within its ranks. As Sharon tells it, one probation officer in her office fed her false information about a gang contract on her life, then left a threatening message on her answering machine. Several POs have been known to pad their caseloads with juveniles who are dead or imprisoned, lowering their workload while appearing to carry a full complement of probationers. Another is known to frequent strip clubs during business hours. Still others openly carry firearms in defiance of department policy.

On a more mundane level—but one that has a far greater negative impact on the juvenile justice system—probation reports are routinely late in Juvenile Court, with many rife with misspellings and factual errors, sometimes crucial ones. Several juvenile judges have openly questioned the literacy of some probation officers in Los Angeles. Probation officers are supposed to conduct independent investigations, but this is rarely done. Many simply rely on police arrest reports, even when writing presentence reports intended to guide judges in their sentencing decisions, at a time when far more recent—and more accurate—trial testimony is available. (A child may be arrested for armed robbery, for example, but convicted at trial of simple assault, a misdemeanor—yet, in many cases the probation report will be written as if the juvenile in question is an armed robber, because that's what the police reports assert.) Once an error is written into a probation report, it can be repeated many times over, since each writer uses the preceding report in a file for background information. Some errors become enshrined in this way, impossible to discover and ferret out of each and every report. There is little chance to correct some errors: Probation officers sometimes fail to check school records, fail to interview crime victims, fail to visit the homes and families of potential probationers. Thoroughness can often go out the window because juvenile POs in Los Angeles are faced with monumental caseloads that challenge their effectiveness and leave many burned out after a few years on the job.

At any one time in Los Angeles, about seventeen thousand kids are HOP—Home On Probation—the most common resolution to a case in Juvenile Court, not counting the do-nothing option. The results are often disappointing—about a third of kids who go HOP will be rearrested for something new. This accounts for the bulk of serious juvenile crime in LA and nationwide—every one of the chronic offenders found in the Sixteen Percent study was on probation at one point, while continuing to commit crimes. (Still, the results of locking kids up are even more disappointing: Nationally, about three out of every four juveniles incarcerated for their crimes will get arrested again after their release.)
²

Given those odds, and the fact that Sharon Stegall's fifty probationers have all been locked up at least once before, it is no surprise that most of her kids end up failing. The Randys and the Carlas and the Blurs outnumber the kids who make it, until even the most modest successes begin to seem spectacular to her.

“I passed all my classes this semester,” a young man tells her after she returns from locking up Randy the probation violator.

“Proof,” the probation officer responds, holding out her hand for the boy's report card. The boy wears a wide, crooked-tooth smile that sheds years from his face. He had been a fugitive for a year, living on the streets, trying to beat a string of car theft charges. Now he's one of Sharon's stars. Still, in her line of work, you take no one's word for anything.

“I'll bring it tomorrow, Ms. Stegall,” he promises, and Sharon decides he will do it. There is no faking the look on his face, the aura of accomplishment he is wearing like a halo. This is a kid who had been flunking every subject, including study period, before he was assigned to Sharon's watch. She has encouraged him, bullied him, intimidated him. She brought in his girlfriend so the two could gang up on him, play bad cop, worse cop, urging him to straighten up. On their first day, Sharon had told him she knew he could do better—the first time anyone had suggested this to him—and that she expected him to do so, or else—also a first. Then she had taken him for a ride in her Jaguar sedan. “You drive this?” he had asked. “You own this?” Sharon didn't tell him she had gotten it used at an obscenely low price because its previous owner considered it a lemon and that, in any case, the credit union owned the lion's share of it. What mattered was that it looked like a rich man's car, which was the message she wanted this boy to take home: that hardworking, honest people could live well. You didn't have to steal or deal to do it. The boy was not lazy—he was capable of boosting a dozen cars in a single day—and he got the message. He went to work. Now he is enjoying the payoff.

“You've come a long way,” Sharon tells him as he gets up to leave. He has not stopped smiling since his arrival. But then she grabs the boy's hands, arching her right eyebrow at the black grime under his fingernails. “But let me tell you something. You have got to wash your hands and keep those nails clean. When you go to apply for a job somewhere, maybe McDonald's or whatever, the manager is going to look at this paw of yours and say, later, bro.”

The boy looks startled at this, then blushes, mumbling something about not having the time to clean up. Sharon nods, trying not to embarrass him, but she knows the real reason for his unkempt appearance: The boy has no father, and his mother has never taken sufficient interest in him to teach him about personal hygiene. He has startling gaps in his knowledge—all Sharon's kids do. It's not their fault. They just don't have any adults in their lives willing to be bothered, much less serve as an example. Some don't know the name of the president. Others wouldn't know the Pledge of Allegiance from a limerick. Many remain ignorant of birth control and AIDS, despite aggressive education programs in LA schools. And this boy doesn't know how to keep himself clean.

“What you do,” Sharon says in a completely neutral voice, carefully masking the profound sadness she feels at having to explain such things to a seventeen-year-old, “is go get you a scrub brush and some soap, and you go like this.” Sharon makes scrubbing motions over her fingernails and knuckles. The boy watches, engrossed, taking mental notes, and Sharon swallows hard when she sees his earnest, intent expression. “Then you buy one of these little nail clippers,” she continues, “they're about fifty cents at the drugstore. . . .”

A short time later, she watches him leave, thinking he has a shot at a decent life, though the pull of his old ways will always be strong, his old friends on the street beckoning. He is not at heart a criminal—though many of her other probationers are, kids with no moral compasses, who don't understand why it is wrong to steal from an innocent stranger or shoot at someone who disses them. That is the other consequence of growing up without any caring adults in your life—you may end up learning nothing about empathy. In the end, you may be unable to experience another person's joy or sadness or grief. There is only your own need, and fuck anyone who gets in the way—a perfect predator, but a lousy human being. Sociopaths are made, not born, it seems to Sharon, and in children, the results are frightening—kids who not only have no concept of right and wrong, but who don't care.

Sharon's probationer with the dirty nails knows the difference, though. He just needed someone to take an interest, to expect something more than failure from him, to hold his feet to the fire. To fill in the gaps. Once in a while, for Sharon, it is that simple.