No Matter How Loud I Shout

by Edward Humes

  Carla claims she shot someone that day, though friends wonder if this is mere boastfulness. She says the boy who was struck survived and recovered. She was never caught or charged with this crime, though she almost died that day. After emptying her revolver at a crowd of rival gang members, a barrage of bullets slapped into the car inches from her as they sped off. The other girl in the car crossed herself, thanking the Virgin Mary for protecting them, but it had never occurred to Carla that she would be struck down. She still doesn’t really believe it’s possible—Carla says she is too smart to be killed. After the drive-by, she stayed out all that night with a small garrison of gang members, hunkered down outside a homeboy’s house, waiting for a retaliation that never came. Then she went home, showered, and went to school. Feeling calm, justified, moral, honorable. And thrilled.

  She was at the time one month shy of her fifteenth birthday.

  Carla still put on a good front at school, still was capable of excelling when she wanted to, still worked extra hours in the office to curry favor, though now it was as much to cover her new deficiencies in class as anything else, the result of more time on the corner, less with the books. At home, the pretense slipped away. She openly defied her mother, she treated her stepfather with studied rudeness, she refused to observe anything like a curfew, much less quit her gang associations. She stayed out for days at a time. The counselor at her middle school who had befriended her tried to help, seeing the girl’s future withering daily, but she was as powerless as Carla’s parents to stop the running away, the truancy, the refusal to obey.

  In years past, Juvenile Court routinely reined in children like Carla early on, before they committed any serious crimes. Running away, incorrigibility, truancy—they are known as “status offenses,” because they affect only a person whose status is as a minor, a child. Part of the logic used at the turn of the century to justify creating a separate juvenile court, and to stop imprisoning ten-year-olds side-by-side with forty-year-olds, lay in the acknowledgment that children are different from adults and therefore should be held to different standards. Not only would the sentences be different, but the offenses themselves would stand apart, too. Under that theory, running away or disobeying one’s parents or skipping school could be crimes in a juvenile court, even though adults could not be prosecuted for identical conduct. Indeed, such offenses made up the bulk of juvenile court cases during the first half of the twentieth century. And as public policy, it makes perfect sense, because the experts knew in 1905, as they do now, that this sort of misbehavior is in virtually every case the precursor of more serious crimes, Carla being just one of countless examples. It is almost impossible to find a juvenile who committed a serious crime today who did not first commit a passel of status offenses. Going after status offenders and putting them under rigorous supervision or even imprisonment proved to be an effective crime prevention tool in juvenile courts nationwide, stopping many kids from committing worse crimes. Carla would have been a perfect candidate.

  But the prosecution of most status offenses ground to a halt in the seventies in California and in many other jurisdictions as well, when laws were adopted that decriminalized them, under the theory that it was unfair to incarcerate kids for behavior that could not get them locked up as adults.1 In part, this came as a logical extension of the Supreme Court’s Gault decision giving kids the same rights as adults; in part, it seemed a way to save money by cutting back services, particularly by gutting the ranks of probation officers who previously supervised status offenders. The juvenile court can still theoretically prosecute status cases—the statutes are still on the books—but judges have no power to enforce their orders, because kids charged under them generally cannot be locked up like delinquents. The laws are toothless. So, many juvenile courts have dropped the pursuit of status cases, and the desperate parents who had once come to police or prosecutors for help and gotten it are turned away. When Carla turned fifteen, her mother had called the sheriff’s station serving her neighborhood and begged for a deputy to come and arrest her daughter for refusing to go to school or to obey her.

  “I’m sorry,” the desk sergeant who took the call had responded. “But unless she commits a crime, there’s nothing we can do. Now, if she does commit a crime, give us a call, we can take a report and get something rolling.”

  Carla’s mother started to say, “But then it will be too late,” but she was speaking to a dial tone. The sergeant had already hung up. Later, when she called the DA’s office, all Peggy Beckstrand could provide was a list of agencies offering counseling services—and advice on how far parents can legally go in disciplining their children before it becomes child abuse. Peggy gets calls asking about that distinction several times a week from parents whose children are out of control. “I wish I could tell you the system can help,” she tells them lamely. “But I can’t. We don’t have the answers.”

  Even when Carla got busted for robbery for taking another girl’s backpack, the system could not help. Carla’s mother had been almost happy when the police called. Finally, she had exclaimed, something would be done, and without her greatest fear being realized—that her girl, or someone else, would get hurt.

  This relief was short-lived, however. The witness in the case—the girl who had reported the crime in the first place—would not cooperate when it came time to go to court, possibly fearing retaliation of some kind. As in adult court, Juvenile Court cases cannot stand on what witnesses tell police—the witnesses have to swear to it personally in court, so Carla could enjoy her constitutional right to face her accuser. It is another legacy of the Gault decision. Peggy’s office had no choice but to drop the case. Carla walked.

  Two months later, she was arrested after police watched her climb out of a stolen Jeep with a couple of other members of Tepa-13, then steal the T-top from another car. Charged with grand theft auto, theft of property, and two counts of receiving stolen property, Carla was released the same day of her arrest after the Probation Department ignored pleas from Carla’s mother that she stay locked up for her own protection. Seven months passed without resolution of the case, a typical delay in Juvenile Court. Peggy’s office had hundreds of backlogged files to wade through before it could even pursue formal charges against the girl.2 Juvenile Court is supposed to be as quick and efficient as a hospital emergency room in stopping a kid’s downward spiral, but Carla went on doing what she wanted, cutting school and hanging with her homeboys, confident she could sweet-talk the court commissioner assigned to hear her case into straight probation. She had already made a very good impression on him during a brief court appearance after her arrest, with the commissioner going on and on about what a fabulous student she was, what enormous potential she had. “He thinks he’s going to lecture me a little and straighten me right up,” she told the guys in Tepa after the hearing. “It’s so funny. He’s got no idea what’s up.”

  It might have worked, too, but before her case could be set for trial, there was a second drive-by shooting, this one ending with her bullets missing their mark, Carla’s head punching through a windshield, and two cops standing in the school office questioning the faculty about her whereabouts. They busted her later that day.

  This time, Carla stayed in Juvenile Hall while her case wound its way through the system, safe from further trouble. Behind bars, her behavior ran true to form: She became a model inmate at Central Juvenile Hall, working for the detention officers, keeping the other kids in line. The staff could literally put their feet up and let Carla do the work.

  Eventually, she was convicted of theft and assault with a deadly weapon by Commissioner Gary Polinksy, one of the three bench officers at Thurgood Marshall Branch. Peggy’s office asked that she serve time in the California Youth Authority, the harshest sentence available for a fifteen-year-old.

  “I’ve got four years and four months over your head, young lady,” Polinsky told her, “and you could very well spend that time at the Youth Authority. Your behavior has been appal
ling.”

  Carla appeared properly abject while the veteran juvenile commissioner, renowned for his bouts of bad temper, continued railing about her path in life, but she did not believe for one moment that he would send her to YA. You just don’t do that with kids who have “potential,” she knew. Her more experienced homeboys had explained the law to her: they knew from their own courtroom misadventures that juvenile judges were required to impose the “least restrictive” sentence possible, which meant that Carla, who had not been sentenced to anything as yet, would never end up in juvenile prison her first time out of the box, not when there were other, less hard-core options available. And Carla got exactly what she expected: Polinsky sentenced her to up to one year at Camp Resnick, one of two dozen rural detention camps run by the Probation Department, where she would join many old friends from the street and gain even further respect from her gang for having done time.

  Once there, Carla again impressed the staff in charge of watching over her with her charm, intelligence, and abilities, getting stellar grades in class and graduating the program with honors after only seven months in custody. Upon her release, she was pronounced a rousing success for the system. Clearly, she had learned her lesson. Carla smiled, promised she would never return, thanked all her counselors, and walked out, carrying a piece of paper that said her new probation officer was someone named Sharon Stegall.

  · · ·

  “I’m doing great, Ms. Stegall,” Carla promises her probation officer this day, on their first visit following her release from camp. “I’m back on track in school, I’m going to make up my credits, and then I’ll be in college prep courses.”

  Sharon remains skeptical. Kids don’t end up on her specialized gang caseload because they are so easily straightened out. Kids end up with Sharon Stegall looking over their shoulder because, if they don’t shape up, their next stop could easily be the state penitentiary.

  Most juvenile POs in Los Angeles have enormous caseloads, far too many kids to supervise closely.3 Sharon, however, is on a special gang detail. Her load is limited to fifty kids, which in contemporary Los Angeles is considered intensive supervision. (Standards change as resources dwindle: In the sixties, many probation officers worked with fewer than twenty kids; thirty-five offenders, even minor ones, were considered the maximum number that could be supervised effectively by any one person.) Sharon and her colleagues on the Metro Gang Unit get the toughest, most hardened kids to supervise, the ones who have committed violent crimes or who have lengthy records and have resisted obeying regular probation officers in the past. Basically, she deals with the Sixteen Percenters—the 16 percent of juvenile delinquents in LA who are hard-core repeat offenders. All of Sharon’s kids have been locked up in camp or CYA before coming to her. Few of them faced any meaningful consequences or supervision early on when it might have mattered. Now, though, these hard cases get the most intensive attention from the system available at this late stage in their criminal careers—when they are least likely to benefit from it. If five out of her fifty kids make it on probation in any given year, she considers it a rousing success.

  “Making it” is defined as not disappearing, dying, or getting arrested for twelve months.4

  “I don’t know, Carla,” Sharon says during that first meeting after Carla’s release from camp. The probation officer has already had a long talk with Carla’s school counselor, mother, and older sister. “I hear you are pretty slick.”

  “No, really, Ms. Stegall. I know now that I have to quit the life. I was just being a follower. Now I know my so-called friends don’t really care about me. I just want to do good in school so I can go to law school and be a lawyer. I want to help people.” Carla flashes that winning smile of hers. “And I like to argue. I’m good at it.”

  “We’ll see,” Sharon says, her voice completely neutral. “Now I’m going to go over your conditions of probation with you, and you’d better listen up, because if you cross the line on any of them, I will hook you up.” Sharon reaches into her purse and pulls out a set of stainless-steel handcuffs, jingling them at Carla. “Now, you will obey all laws. You will submit to being searched by any peace officer or probation officer with or without a warrant. You will not consume alcoholic beverages or any controlled substance. You will not associate with any gang members, wear gang clothing, or use any gang signs or gestures. . . .” The list goes on a good five minutes. There are twenty-four separate conditions.

  When the litany of dos and don’ts is completed and Carla walks from the office, promising to be good, Sharon turns and says to a colleague, “I give that girl a week before she blows it.”

  It turns out that Sharon underestimated Carla.

  That same night finds Carla on a corner with her Tepa-13 friends, exchanging high fives and passing around a little homegrown, catching up and kicking back. Then they show their long-absent home girl what they have been up to while she was at Camp Resnick. One of her homeboys lifts up his shirt and says, “Check this out.”

  His abdomen bears an enormous and still freshly scabbed tattoo, with “Tepa” spelled in six-inch-high Old English letters emblazoned across his belly like a billboard. Carla looks closely at the needlework, admiring the artistry—and the nerve it took to get it. She knew that it had to have hurt like hell, and every guy in the gang had one just like it. Several of them were on probation with the Juvenile Court; the tattoos were blatant violations, an instant ticket to the hall for each of them if word got out. Her probation conditions were specific: no gang tattoos. There is only one thing Carla can say.

  “So when do I get mine?”

  · · ·

  Within a week, Carla is missing, her mother is frantic, and Sharon Stegall is conferring in the hallway with Deputy in Charge Peggy Beckstrand. They agree she needs to be locked up. It is one more case for the head prosecutor to juggle as she prepares for her murder case against Ronald Duncan.

  “How is that thing going, anyway?” Sharon asks, after the two women decide to seek commitment to the California Youth Authority for Carla—if Sharon catches her before she ends up with a murder charge of her own to face. “That Baskin Robbins is right in my neighborhood. The owners were good people. You going to win?”

  Peggy shrugs. It is the same question she asks herself daily. “I’m pretty sure I’ll convict him, Sharon,” the prosecutor says. “But I don’t think anyone’s going to win.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Nine Days to Manhood

  “It won’t be long now,” Ronald Duncan announces as he swaggers into the writing class on Unit K/L at Central Juvenile Hall. “Pretty soon, I’ll be walkin’ free.”

  “Yeah, you and O. J.,” one of the other students says, smirking and cocking his head at the TV bolted to the wall outside in the dayroom, where tape of the ex-football player’s infamous low-speed chase is on the tube once again.

  Ronald ignores the remark. He is in unusually high spirits for a kid who just came back from court on the 8:00 P.M. bus, an exhausting day of thin bologna sandwiches and long waits in cold holding tanks punctuated by bewildering court appearances. He slumps into a chair, low enough to be eye level with the library table’s surface, a compact sixteen-year-old with broad shoulders and a small head, a sparse collection of whiskers curling from his chin like mistletoe. He has a wide, yellow-toothed smile that he wears often, but his expression is unintentionally disconcerting, because his dark brown eyes never quite manage to point in the same direction at the same time.

  “I’m tellin’ you, I’m on my way out,” he insists, but as is so often the case with Ronald, I cannot tell if he is serious or joking. The smile almost never goes away.

  “Oh, yeah? Your trial go good today?” Chris asks. “Or you just plannin’ to bust out?”

  Everyone laughs, Ronald included, though there is an edge of nastiness to the amusement. He is not particularly popular in the class—quick to criticize, he never seems to write anything of his own—but there is little else to talk about in the lockup
besides handicapping one another’s cases and figuring out ways to smuggle dope into the hall. So when he falls silent, someone prods again. “So how did it go?”

  Ronald shrugs. It is a chillingly nonchalant gesture for a kid with a double murder charge against him, for it is not pretense or bluster. “It went pretty good. I told them I was innocent.”

  The six other boys in the class nod. While in the courtroom, everyone here is innocent. Back on the unit, however, most of the kids say they pretty much did what they’re in for, or something close to it.

  “What’d you do, tell them you’re no killer, just a punk tagger?” Geri Vance asks. In the Juvenile Hall hierarchy, graffiti artists—taggers—are lightweights, commanding little respect.

  “Tag-banger,” Ronald corrects quickly. “We’re a lot badder than just taggers.”

  The other boys in the small classroom laugh again. Ronald often tries to impress the others with tales of his supposed criminal prowess, no matter how counterproductive that might be for a kid trying to get out from under a murder charge. He is wasting his time, though: Most kids who have been in the system as long as his classmates have possess finely honed bullshit meters. They can tell in a moment from Ronald’s showy bravado and too-cool patter that before his arrival at the lockup, he never did much of anything wrong, always small and quiet and slightly left out, invisible in class, invisible to girls. He just had this slightly off-kilter appearance, and people always assumed the worst, giving him a wide berth, the way you would a quiescent yet mean-looking dog. In the lockup, they know better.