No Matter How Loud I Shout (63 page)

1
. Numbers are for arrests of juveniles in Los Angeles County in 1994, as compiled by the California Department of Justice's Law Enforcement Information Center. These represent arrests only, not actual cases filed in Juvenile Court, or convictions. For example, out of 27,144 arrests of juveniles for felonies, nearly 22 percent were released without charges ever being filed in court—in part because of system overcrowding and backlog, in part because of evidentiary problems.

2
. Richard Perez was eventually transferred to adult court and convicted of first-degree murder; he faces thirty years to life in prison.

3
. From
Initial Referrals to Juvenile Probation in Los Angeles County, January–June 1990: A Cohort Follow-up
, by the Los Angeles County Probation Department; and from interviews with senior Probation Department officials.

1
. A complaint of misconduct against Beckstrand and one of her deputies was ultimately dismissed.

2
. The Probation Department's study of repeat offenders, referred to by Juvenile Court insiders as the Sixteen Percent Solution, not only showed that many of its efforts are statistically futile, but also that those efforts are primarily aimed at the children least likely to benefit—the most hardened repeat offenders, rather than the neophytes who could still be turned from a life of crime.

Another 1994 study,
The Juvenile Crime Challenge: Making Prevention a Priority
, by a respected California state watchdog agency called the Little Hoover Commission, also criticized these skewed priorities: “Front-line workers decry their inability to cope with the minor juvenile delinquent because of the pressing demands on their time and resources by chronic, violent offenders. This situation is especially distressing since these worst-case juveniles not only soak up resources because of the high cost of their treatment but also are the least likely to be deterred from a life of crime regardless of the treatment options undertaken. Placing a high priority on ‘front-end' programs is difficult without new funding but is critical to any successful crime prevention effort.”

3
. Figures are from the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's 1994 statistical report on the nation's juvenile courts (the report examines the calendar year 1992). A separate study of arrest rates contained in
Juvenile Offenders and Victims
, May 1995, also from the Justice Department, reaches similar conclusions and states: “The proportion of violent crimes committed by juveniles is disproportionately high compared with their share of the U.S. population, and the number of these crimes is growing.” The report found that juveniles are responsible for one in five violent crimes, one in three burglaries, and nearly half of all arsons and auto thefts.

4
. This figure includes the two sides of Juvenile Court in Los Angeles. The delinquency court, which handles children under the age of eighteen who commit crimes, has ten different courthouse locations, with twenty-eight bench officers (judges and court commissioners). The court handles about 30,000 new prosecutions a year, with about 35,000 kids under supervision as wards of the court at any one time, and conducting about 150,000 hearings a year. The dependency side of the court, which cares for and supervises abused and neglected children, removing them from (or reuniting them with) their biological parents, has twenty-one judges in one courthouse. It takes on about 14,000 new wards every year, with about 48,000 under supervision of the court at any one time. Source: Jim Shepard, Court Administrator, Juvenile Court Services. In some other California jurisdictions and in many other states, the dependency and delinquency functions are not separated, with the same judges handling both types of cases.

1
. The 1994 Little Hoover Commission report,
The Juvenile Crime Challenge: Making Prevention a Priority
, notes: “In 1977 status offenders (runaways, truants and incorrigible children) were taken out of the juvenile incarceration system with the goal of keeping them separate from hardened criminals. Once again, local services did not develop to take up the slack and today status offenders receive little of the attention they need until they topple over the brink into delinquency” (p. 59).

The report continues (p. 123): “Juveniles . . . are the critical linchpin in any effort to divert criminals from lifelong predatory careers. The earlier a person is reached with rehabilitation opportunities, the more likely change is to occur and the greater the rewards in crime cost avoidance. Despite this universally accepted credo, California (and the nation as a whole) has placed far more emphasis on dealing with the end product of crime than on prevention and early intervention measures.”

2
. Delays are a critical problem in Juvenile Court, because children do not respond well to sanctions and discipline unless they are imposed quickly. “The message that
individuals are responsible for the decisions they make and that illegal actions are accompanied by consequences is often lost in today's juvenile justice system. A child may face little more than a lecture for the first half-dozen offenses, tactics that are the hallmark of the adult system are employed to get the youth ‘off the hook,' and long delays separate deed from outcome. The stark reality of the impact of the juveniles' actions on their victims and other members of society is also lost in a system that has little room for victim input” (ibid., page viii).

3
. The author, in interviews with more than a dozen probation officers and their supervisors, found that overburdened caseloads make most efforts at juvenile supervision, in the words of deputy probation officer Sharon Stegall, “a joke.” The problem is by no means unique to Los Angeles. According to the report
State/Local Juvenile Corrections in California—A Systems Perspective
(California Youth Authority, January 11, 1994): “Currently, large numbers of probationers on county caseloads go essentially unsupervised because available resources are no match for the multitude of cases. Minimum supervision/service and ‘paper' caseloads predominate; and in general even ‘supervised' probationers are rarely seen by a probation officer.”

4
. Again, the author found this grim outlook common among probation officers interviewed. The Little Hoover Commission report noted: “Front-line workers decry their inability to cope with the minor juvenile delinquent because of the pressing demands on their time and resources by chronic, violent offenders. This situation is especially distressing since these worst-case juveniles not only soak up resources because of the high cost of their treatment but also are the least likely to be deterred from a life of crime regardless of the treatment options undertaken” (p. vii).

1
. The focus of many, if not most, recent attempts to reform the juvenile justice system throughout the nation has revolved around making it easier to try kids as adults—a throwback to the days before juvenile court was even conceived, and a direct result of the burgeoning violent crime committed by kids, which the juvenile justice system seems ill equipped to handle. Thanks in part to Ronald Duncan's case, California changed state law so that that kids fourteen and older charged with serious and violent crimes could be shifted to adult court at prosecutors' behest. The law was passed in 1994 and took effect January 1, 1995. By the beginning of 1995, only one state in the nation—Hawaii—still tried all children under sixteen as juveniles.

2
. Many studies of juvenile offenders have found common threads in the backgrounds of kids who commit crimes, and these threads tend to be the ones that common sense dictates should be there. The Probation Department's Sixteen Percent study, for example, found that repeat offenders more often tend to come from homes in which only one parent is present (in many cases, the father is never present in the home); from homes where child abuse and/or substance abuse is a problem; and where school attendance and performance is not a priority. Poverty is also a common factor, though not as high on the list. Kids from such homes are considered to be “at risk,” meaning they should get increased attention from the system. Often, though, such children are low priorities for the system—until they commit serious crimes.

The importance of having supportive, nonabusive parents in lowering the risk of delinquent and criminal behavior was demonstrated by a fascinating and unusual study
conducted by the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation in Michigan over a period of decades beginning in the 1960s (the results of which were reported in the
New York Times
on November 30, 1994). Two groups of toddlers were chosen at random from a poor neighborhood; in one group, the children were sent to a high-quality preschool program, and their parents attended parenting and violence-prevention classes. The control group received neither service. The children were reinterviewed at age twenty-seven. Researchers found that the group that received no preschool and no parenting classes was five times more likely to have serious arrest records.

The full results:

3
. Plea bargains did not generally exist in the juvenile justice system until the Supreme Court's Gault decision that transformed Juvenile into a mirror image of adult court, where plea bargaining has long served as vital lubrication of the system. In the past, Juvenile Court sentences were determined solely by the judge's estimation of what a child needed. Now, the sentence is determined in large part by agreements between defense attorneys and prosecutors, over which judges have little or no control.

1
. Geri Vance provided this account of his childhood, in his writings and in interviews with the author. Court records confirm that he had a chaotic childhood, the fact that his mother was incarcerated for a time, and that he had been removed from his home. Specific details of his upbringing are based solely on Geri's recollections. The author could not locate either of his parents in order to obtain their account of events.

2
. In the first five months of 1994, postponements were granted in more than fifteen thousand hearings in Juvenile Court. For 11 percent of these, the reason for the delay cited in the court's minute entries was “FTA”—failure to appear by the juvenile.

3
. In an effort to differentiate juvenile proceedings from adult criminal hearings, the founders of the juvenile justice system in California and around the nation tried to create a different series of terms, supposedly to avoid the stigmatizing impact of words such as “defendant,” “indictment,” “conviction”—even the phrase “guilty as charged” is, technically, not supposed to be used. Using the term “delinquent” rather than “criminal” was supposed to eliminate most of the stigma; instead, the new term developed a stigma just as serious as, and virtually synonymous with, the one it replaced. Still, the system clings to its alternative terminology. Instead of the “defendant,” the juvenile is referred to as a “minor.” Instead of the DA filing criminal charges, prosecutors file a
“delinquency petition.” Instead of a “bail hearing,” juveniles get a “detention hearing.” Instead of a “preliminary hearing” to determine probable cause, juveniles get a “William M.” or an “Edsel P.” hearing—names drawn from California court cases decided on appeal (William M. and Edsel P. are the names of minors, their last names reduced to initials in appellate pleadings to protect the confidentiality granted most juveniles, again to avoid stigma). Instead of pronouncing the child guilty, a judge finds “the petition is sustained.” Instead of sentencing the child, a “disposition” is imposed.

The most important distinction is that juvenile offenses are part of the civil legal code, not the criminal code. This distinction is confused somewhat, however, because in California, like most states, the juvenile civil code is a mirror image of the adult penal statutes. As the Hoover Commission report,
The Juvenile Crime Challenge
(1994) notes
here
, “Originally created to be a swift, confidential mechanism for getting youths treatment and services, the juvenile courts operate today much like adult criminal courts because of changes in law, court rulings and public attitudes.”

In the wake of burgeoning serious juvenile crime and court decisions granting more rights to children, new laws have been passed that alter the original juvenile codes, shifting the emphasis away from rehabilitation and toward punishment and the protection of society, further blurring the distinctions between juvenile and adult systems. In contemporary juvenile courts, for example, children charged with serious and violent crimes are no longer entitled to confidentiality—the hearings are open to press and public—and many of these children can be transferred to adult court. As such, the alternative terminology used in the juvenile system is less an effective tool to avoid stigma, and more a vestigial organ, like an appendix, with no useful function. System insiders and the kids themselves view the terminology as little more than a lexicon of euphemisms for proceedings that no longer differ substantially from adult criminal matters. And in court, their usage has gradually relaxed—the attorneys talk of guilty pleas, the prosecutors of charges, the judges sometimes slip and sentence a child instead of disposing of him.