No Matter How Loud I Shout (38 page)

Approximately two weeks later, this lady . . . interviewed me, then placed me in a foster home.

Geri puts down his papers and says, “That's as far as I got.” He looks shyly at the other boys, who remain silent for a moment, then deluge him with compliments. Ronald Duncan is there that day, and he says, “They ought to make a movie out of your life, man,” and everyone laughs and agrees.

One boy, though—Chris, the pizza robber who just received his high school diploma in a dirty and unceremonious manila envelope—is unusually quiet. He normally leads the critiquing sessions, but today, he seems preoccupied and upset after hearing Geri's story. He just stares vacantly at his own papers, so I prod him gently. “What do you think, Chris?”

He looks up after a moment. Chris is the class philosopher, as well as the closest thing to a jailhouse lawyer the unit has. Most of his essays are critiques of the justice system. “I was just thinking about foster homes,” he says. “What it's like to get put in one. It's like you're no better than trash. You're so low, not even your own parents want you. At least when you're a delinquent and you get taken from your home, it's because of some crime you did. It
doesn't mean your parents don't want you. But when you go into foster care, that's worse. That means nobody wants you. You're just out like the trash.”

Several kids in the room are nodding as Chris speaks. They have felt this way, too, with all the anger and emptiness it implies, though no one has ever articulated it so well for them before.

“But when a kid goes into foster care, it's the parents' fault, not the kids',” I protest, my need to offer some comfort here, however inadequate, marching me into a tired cliché. “Geri didn't do anything to deserve being taken away. It's not the foster kids' fault.”

But my students shake their heads—I clearly have missed the point, and not for the first or last time, these teenagers have left me feeling naïve. “That may be true, that it isn't the foster kid's fault,” Chris says sadly, “but that's how it feels.”

Geri nods. “You always think it's your fault. You always wonder if you could have been a better kid, then maybe it would never have happened—maybe they never would have taken you away. Hell,” he says, averting his eyes from the other boys in the room, “I still think that.”

T
HE
case files are stacked up like cordwood on top of Judge Dorn's bench, and the courtroom is overflowing with rustling, coughing, grumbling lawyers, cops, children, and parents waiting to hear the clerk read their names from the docket so they can get on with their lives.

Their impatience is of a particularly sour variety today because most of them realize their waiting will accomplish nothing. When their cases are finally called, there will simply be more continuances, more legal rituals, more dates to come back again to court to wait anew. It doesn't help that the courtroom is a furnace today, a crying infant stationed on either side of the room, the smell of hot dust in the air from the ancient heating system heaving asthmatically somewhere deep in the old building's basement. People keep crowding through the door of the courtroom, standing room only now, wondering why nothing is happening, why the judge's chair is vacant. Even the bailiff, whose job by definition is to wait, is drumming his fingers and staring anxiously at Judge Dorn's door.

And still, Dorn remains huddled in his chambers, where he has been for the past fifteen minutes in a private meeting with a mother and her recalcitrant
daughter. It is the latest in his increasingly frequent attempts to keep status offenders from becoming crime statistics—at the cost of his regular docket. Every eye in the courtroom keeps drifting toward the closed door to Dorn's domain. Then, at the twenty-minute mark, faints sounds begin to emerge from chambers. Like an approaching thunderstorm, Judge Dorn's raised and angry voice can be heard pushing its way through the heavy wooden door, at first as an indecipherable rumble, then gradually rising in pitch. Finally, the words become loud enough to be clearly audible, even in the back of the courtroom, even over the howls of the babies.

“Anyone who is telling you to go against the orders of your mother,” Dorn is railing, “must want you to be a prostitute.”

The stirring throng in the gallery falls silent for a moment, straining to hear, a roomful of voyeurs picturing Dorn, cheeks inflated, glaring across his desktop at some child. The judge's voice dips below audible, then rises again. “Mother, you file the necessary papers, and I'll put you back in control. I promise you that. You think you know these streets, young lady? You know nothing. You don't know it, but you are headed on a quick trip to the cemetery, or the penitentiary, one or the other.”

The door opens a few moments later. A sullen teenaged girl stalks out without a word or a look back, her long braids bobbing as she strides from the room. Her head is high and she is wearing the classic teen sneer, that perfect look of supreme contempt for the adult world, whose values she rejects even as she claims its privileges. The girl's mother follows like an attendant, face tight with embarrassment, eyes downward so that she need not meet anyone else's glance in that courtroom—as if the other parents there do not know exactly what she is feeling, the pain and helplessness and bewildered humiliation. She lingers only long enough to accept some papers from Dorn's probation officer and to mumble her thanks. She pushes out of the courtroom wearing the haunted look of someone who has just learned a loved one is terminally ill.

“It doesn't appear we've reached this young lady today,” Dorn says absently. “Perhaps some time in the hall will convince her.”

Then, without apology or explanation, Dorn climbs back on the bench and shuffles files, ready to resume his scheduled hearings after the protracted delay. He stares unmoved at the irritated looks of the attorneys who have been waiting at the defense and prosecution tables during his absence, and who now suspect—correctly—that Dorn, once again, is going to work straight through lunch, right up to the point his court reporter's hands cramp up into claws and she begs for a rest. The message is clear:
Dorn's informal in-chambers hearings are every bit as important to him as his official calendar. Perhaps more so.

“Call the next case,” he says gruffly. His failure to cajole the girl into obedience has left him in a foul mood. He won't take it out on the kids who come before him, but the lawyers know they are in for a rough time. They hate his informal sessions, which have become increasingly frequent, up to several a day now. The Star Chamber, they call it. Or the Inquisition.

Dorn doesn't care. He calls these meetings the juvenile system's best chance to help families, and its surest hope for survival. They are the mainstay of his one-judge campaign to shift the priorities of Juvenile Court away from the formally charged repeat offenders and toward the kids teetering on the edge, the ones for whom violence and arrest, addiction or death, are clearly in the cards, but still—perhaps—avoidable.

The girl he lectured in chambers today has just turned seventeen and is refusing to go to school or to observe any sort of curfew. She refuses the simplest request from her parents. She has been stealing from them and, they believe, using the money for drugs. They blame her older boyfriend, a gang member, for pushing her down this path—the fellow Dorn accused of trying to turn the girl into a prostitute.

Her mother came to Dorn because she had heard through her church that he could step in when the police couldn't or wouldn't. When tackling such a case, the judge first tries a stern lecture, which, for many kids, is enough. Being hauled to that prisonlike courthouse, made to wait in the crowded courtroom, and then encountering a master of verbal intimidation like Dorn is enough to scare most kids. But if that fails, he tells the parents that he will help them bring a status offense case. All the parent has to do is fill out a complaint with the Probation Department and if a probation investigation confirms the problem, Dorn can use an old state law to declare the child incorrigible and put him or her on probation.

This is how Dorn believes the court can become a tool for prevention, intervening before a child commits a real crime—even providing a way of targeting the Sixteen Percenters before they embark on their chain of offenses and are claimed by the terminal illness of delinquency.

“Think of all the precious resources we can save by straightening these young people out now, before it's too late,” he exhorts those who gripe about his plan. “Think about all the precious lives we can save. We can alter the lives of these minors, as well as their potential victims, for the better. This is the perfect prevention vehicle. But it is a lot of work, and so it has fallen out of favor. I hope to change that.”

Later in the day, another status offender is brought before Dorn, this time a somewhat more malleable fourteen-year-old who has been staying out late and refusing his mother's orders, having fallen under the influence of an eighteen-year-old gangbanger in his neighborhood. The boy enters the courtroom a small bundle of fury with a shaved head, kicking his legs angrily as he waits in a seat in the gallery, wedged between his mother and his pastor. Dorn deliberately has him sit there for more than two hours, watching cases, listening to the judge repeat his lectures about choosing between education and poverty, of cemeteries and penitentiaries. The boy watches Dorn reward the kids who succeed, who go to school and earn passing grades they have never earned before. And he watches the ample failures, child after child sent to camp and detention as Dorn ruthlessly enforces his personal standards of school attendance, of unexcused absences, of keeping one's word and following the rules as laid down by Judge Dorn.

After a while, the pastor whispers to the boy, “Don't worry, your turn's coming,” which, of course, instantly transforms the boy's anger into fear, just as the minister intended. Finally, after revoking a young car thief's probation for not going to school on time, Dorn greets the pastor and the boy's mother warmly, frowns at the boy, then rises from the bench and ushers all three into his chambers as several defense lawyers waiting for their cases to be called groan audibly.

Inside, Dorn lays it on thick with the boy, threatening him with detention if he does not straighten up—an idle threat at this point, since the boy has committed no crime and Dorn has no legal jurisdiction. (“But he doesn't know that,” Dorn chuckles later.) Dorn also chides the boy for hurting his mother, for repaying her love with disrespect and contempt. “Why would you follow some reprobate in your neighborhood, who undoubtedly is going to end up in the penitentiary or worse, rather than your mother who loves you?”

The joint appeal to conscience and fear, combined with the sobering sight of Dorn meting out justice for two hours, has the desired effect. The boy leaves a changed child, outwardly at least. In front of Dorn, he hugs and kisses his mother, then apologizes, promising to change his ways. Dorn congratulates him for his maturity, then orders him to stay away from the eighteen-year-old who has been leading him astray, lest he find out what Juvenile Hall looks like from the inside out. (“It's not really an order at all,” Dorn admits later. “But he doesn't know that.”)

And so Judge Dorn, using the power of his robe and a heavy dose of intimidation, accomplishes what the law and the system normally cannot
do: He puts a boy back on track. (A year later, the young man is doing well in school and has stayed out of trouble. His mother has no doubt about who deserves credit for that: Judge Dorn.)

Dorn's seemingly simple approach to preventing delinquency—the classic, paternalistic godfather role envisioned in the more innocent times that spawned Juvenile Court—was at the outset met with great skepticism throughout the system. First, there was the sense that kids today were just too sophisticated for lectures and tirades. And, beyond that, the bureaucracy that exists to screen cases and to select which kids enter the system, and which get to walk, is reluctant to cede its authority. Judge Dorn is setting up a wholly separate gateway to the system, one that bypasses the Probation Department and the DA and walks right in through the judge's chambers—and which uses the status offenses long ago discarded and ignored by a system intently focused on young, hardened criminals.

As he expected, soon after Judge Dorn began his new program, there were complaints that he was squandering precious court time and probation resources on kids who hadn't even committed a crime, while serious offenders were waiting their turn, their cases delayed. The criticisms escalated when Dorn, who has made it clear that placating him will always be easier than opposing him, persuaded the Probation Department to dedicate one officer to do nothing but handle his status offense cases. It was assumed that this PO would have little to do and could soon return to regular duties, but, to everyone's surprise but Dorn's, parents began showing up regularly at Dorn's door, their children in tow. Just through word of mouth at schools and churches, forty to fifty children a month were soon coming to Dorn, then trooping to his special PO for status offense investigations. The demand for such a service—and its potential for success—were far higher than anyone had realized. The interest in the community in Dorn's program has been so startling (and its success so great, though Dorn's claim of a 95 percent success rate has yet to be proven) that a task force on juvenile justice issues brought together by Dorn decided to recommend the judge's status offender program be duplicated in every juvenile courthouse in LA.