No Matter How Loud I Shout

by Edward Humes

  The urge to fix the system seems to have hit with particular intensity in Los Angeles this year. The competing factions of reform are already grappling like rival gangs struggling for turf: Judge Dorn, for one, is assembling his own task force, working to build an odd little shadow court operating under its own rules and priorities within the larger Los Angeles system, focusing on the minor offenders the rest of the Juvenile Court tends to ignore. For him, Juvenile Court is the last, best engine of social change, one that can be made lustrous again with just a few commonsense improvements.

  The governor of California, meanwhile, who has presided over a budget-busting program of prison construction (operating expenses: $3.8 billion a year and growing), is pursuing exactly the opposite course, backing a passel of new laws to fill the adult courts and adult penitentiaries with kids. To him, Juvenile Court is a dysfunctional relic that allows young predators to sneer at justice and kill with impunity—a law-and-order position that dovetailed nicely with his newly minted presidential aspirations.

  The Los Angeles County Probation Department has its own separate initiative under way, an attempt to turn its harrowing study of repeat offenders (and its finding that the Juvenile Court is statistically irrelevant in stopping crime) into a useful new tool. By constructing a detailed profile of repeat offenders, the department hopes to learn how to spot and help the worst delinquents before they become the worst—a promising idea with some difficult ethical dilemmas attached, not the least of which is the notion of going after kids for crimes they might commit down the line. If it works, though, it could lead to a system that heads off delinquency before most kids ever reach Juvenile Court—a planned obsolescence everyone could welcome. Or, at the least, the fruits of this study would justify a reordering of priorities within the Juvenile Court, so that first-time offenders would be dealth with decisively, rather than being handed free pass after free pass until someone ends up hurt or dead.

  And then there is the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s initiative, the one effort that could make or break the juvenile justice system once and for all.

  In the midst of the Ronald Duncan murder trial, and all that the Thirty-one Flavors case illustrates about the state of juvenile justice in America, Peggy Beckstrand has been summoned to a meeting with her boss. DA Gil Garcetti is assembling all his supervising juvenile prosecutors from each branch of the court to discuss a new attempt to sweep the juvenile slate clean. This, by far, is the most ambitious and far-reaching of California’s juvenile reform efforts, with allies in the state capital ready to join with Garcetti to fashion new legislation that would shut down every Juvenile Court in the state and replace it with . . . something new. No one as yet is quite sure what that new something will be, other than it must go far beyond mere piecemeal tinkering with the existing system. It must be a wholesale, start-from-scratch remake that could build on what the governor and Judge Dorn and the Probation Department are doing, or discard these efforts entirely for a new system no one has yet fully envisioned. Garcetti is pushing for a statewide task force to study how to do this, drawing on experts from every side of the system, adversaries and allies alike, with the mission of rewriting the juvenile code start to finish.

  “And that’s what we’re here to discuss,” Garcetti tells Peggy and her seven counterparts from the other Juvenile Court branches he has gathered together for this meeting. “You know the system better than anyone.”

  Garcetti is a tall, thin, flush-faced man elected two years earlier to replace an unpopular predecessor he once served as a top deputy. The job makes him the most visible DA in America, thanks to Michael Jackson, the Menendez brothers, O. J. Simpson, and Court TV. But along with the glitz, he has inherited a massive operation with a ravaged budget, depleted morale, and a reputation of not being able to win the big one, having lost a series of widely publicized cases, from the McMartin preschool molestation case, to the Menendez brothers parricide mistrial, to the prosecution of the cops who beat Rodney King, to the never-prosecuted child molestation investigation of pop superstar Jackson. In the midst of what would eventually become the biggest loss of all, the Simpson case, he has decided the legacy he really wants to leave behind is in the long-neglected arena of juvenile justice.

  To his credit, Garcetti has been doing considerable legwork for a man holding one of LA’s top political offices, talking to judges, lawyers, child development experts, and, most unusual for a prosecutor, to some of the kids his office has put in Juvenile Hall. Prosecutors are not known for listening to what criminals have to say, but Garcetti realized that kids could tell him about the system from the inside. This led him to a particularly edifying—and unnerving—question-and-answer session with some of the kids in Unit K/L at Central Juvenile Hall, where most of the writing class lives.

  The kids don’t often get a chance to talk to someone with real power (there are their judges, of course, but they are viewed as robed symbols far beyond reach, “looking down on me like some great white god,” one of the kids wrote in class) and the questions flowed. Why is everyone afraid of us? Why do they want to lock us up with adult criminals? Why does everyone think, just because you belong to a gang, that you’re a criminal? But it was something one of the younger boys said that stuck with Garcetti long after he left the hall, a little kid who kept asking about murder. He was fourteen years old, though to the DA the kid looked eight or nine, smooth-faced and angelic—which made him all the more frightening to behold.

  “If I kill someone,” the kid asked, “can I go to the gas chamber?”

  When Garcetti said no and turned to another boy, the same fresh-faced kid persisted. “Even if I kill more than one person? They still have to let me go when I’m twenty-five?”

  “That’s right. That’s what the law requires. For now. That’s probably going to change, though.”

  “But right now, even if I kill ten people, they can’t send me to the gas chamber, they have to let me go?”

  Garcetti changed the subject then, but the encounter stayed with him, and he tells his juvenile prosecutors about it, how it hit home to him that kids at every level of the system know the Juvenile Court often can’t touch them. “You talk to youngsters,” he says later, “and they tell you, repeatedly, that they got away with so much—that they commit crimes, but aren’t arrested, or if they are arrested, when they are brought into court, nothing happens. That’s common knowledge. If you expect that, that you can get away with a helluva lot, that affects your behavior. You start making the kinds of calculations this boy in Juvenile Hall was making. Or you don’t even think about the consequences at all, because they don’t matter. . . . That’s why I want fully dedicated, full-time experts on this task force, nothing less. I don’t want to do this half-ass. It’s just too important.”

  That, he tells Peggy and her colleagues, is what today’s meeting is about—he wants to pick the brains of the juvenile DA supervisors. “I want your input,” he tells them. “We’re wiping the slate clean. You are the emperor. What would you do?”

  To Peggy and the other frustrated supervisors of juvenile prosecutions, who see their cases dismissed, mishandled, and mistried on a daily basis, this question is like asking a kid what kind of chocolate she likes. Not since Juvenile Court first was conceived at the turn of the century to stop the imprisonment and execution of children alongside adults has the stage been set for a top-to-bottom rethinking of how to treat delinquents. The suggestions start coming rapid-fire: Lower the fitness age. Alter the burden of proof to make it easier to convict. Create a two-tier system, one for wayward kids, and one for the thugs and the killers where punishment, not rehabilitation, is the goal. As the suggestions roll in, Garcetti sits back and says little else, content to take notes on a yellow legal pad as his experts in the field warm to the subject.

  “I think we ought to have direct filing of murder charges in adult court, with no age restrictions,” Peggy suggests, the Duncan case and his nine-day window of invulnerability still heavy on
her mind. “Murder is different. Kids who commit murder should automatically lose their right to be kids.”

  “How about direct filing of all major felonies in adult court?” a colleague suggests, taking Peggy’s idea a step further. “Why stop with murder?”

  Again thinking of Duncan and his inevitable freedom at age twenty-five, Peggy reminds the group they should not focus solely on the front end of the process—the when and where and how charges are filed and tried—but on the back end, too, the conditions of release for juveniles.

  “Murderers shouldn’t just get to walk out the door at age twenty-five,” she says. “There should be some sort of review, parole, perhaps—and the power to keep them indefinitely locked up if they’re still dangerous. Killers shouldn’t walk out the door with a clean record and no supervision just because of a birthday.”

  Similar suggestions follow, all with a common theme: The system needs to be tougher on kids, imprisoning them longer, focusing more on protecting the public and less on protecting a youthful innocence that no longer seems to exist. For this group, the fix consists of pushing the juvenile justice system back toward the nineteenth-century model, when adults and children were treated exactly the same. Juvenile criminals are more sophisticated and less remorseful than previous generations, the prosecutors seem to agree. Treating today’s child criminals differently from adults, Peggy says, “flat out isn’t working.”

  The setting for this attack on the system is appropriately glum: the musty and dark Eastlake Branch, largest in the system, a moldering, castlelike facility attached to Central Juvenile Hall, the busiest, most crowded, toughest branch of Juvenile Court. It consists of one long shotgun barrel of a hallway, branching off into a warren of offices and courtrooms. The shotgun barrel itself is crammed with people during court hours, close and sweaty as a subway car at rush hour, filled with a constant babble of voices as the attorneys interview their clients, negotiate deals with prosecutors, and whisper with witnesses while waiting for their cases to be called. It is a noisy, artless place, with smeary, colorless walls and an entrance equipped with a metal detector and a luggage X-ray machine, neither of which is working. (In a typical example of the juvenile system’s odd priorities, none of the delinquency court branches have functioning metal detectors or secure entrances, although there clearly is a need for them—kids taken into custody after court hearings are routinely found carrying weapons. Yet, the county’s new state-of-the-art dependency court, which hears child welfare matters only, no criminal cases—but which also just happens to house the Juvenile Court presiding judge—has an elaborate, airport-style checkpoint at the door, with guard, metal detector, and X-ray machine.)

  The meeting is taking place in the courthouse’s lineup room, where juvenile suspects stand in a row for witnesses to view through one-way glass. It is no different from similar adult facilities in police stations throughout the city, and it seems all the more appropriate for a discussion of dismantling the juvenile justice system.

  But one of the prosecutors, silent throughout the discussion, waits for a lull in the torrent of suggestions, then voices his discomfort and disagreement.

  “Unless we address some of the root causes, some of the social problems that contribute to juvenile crime, none of these things is going to make a bit of difference,” Jim Hickey tells the gathering. The others look at him as if he had just rolled a stink bomb into the room. Hickey looks at some of their expressions and sighs. “Everyone says the children of the eighties and nineties are different, worse, more dangerous,” he says. “I beg to disagree. The children are the same. They do horrible, unchildish things because they have had very horrible, unchildish lives for ten years. It’s like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.”

  Hickey is the supervising prosecutor at Los Padrinos Juvenile Court. He is a tall, gentle man, with a big mustache and sad eyes, the sort who brown-bags a meal every day so he can work at his desk through the lunch hour, who thinks murderers, whatever their age, ought to be punished as adults, but who resists his office’s tough fitness policy when he thinks lesser offenders deserve a break, and who thinks working on truancy cases is just as important as working on major felonies. “Every kid who comes to Juvenile Court starts out with problems at school, and that’s what we need to address,” he reminds his colleagues. He is, in short, not in the mainstream of prosecutorial thought when it comes to juvenile justice—and glad of it.

  “If some of these fourteen- and fifteen-year-old armed robbers were taken at age six and assigned to loving, good parents, things would be different,” he says. “No single solution is going to solve this. We have to start addressing the root causes, or it’s all moot—we’ll never fix the system.”

  The room falls silent. A few look embarrassed by Hickey’s comments. Several of the prosecutors exchange looks, one rolls his eyes. But Hickey pushes on. If we can just help families, if we can keep kids in school and off the streets, he argues, we’ll do more to combat juvenile crime than a hundred new prisons could do. “And it should be up to us to say, Hey, we’re for public safety, we’re for stopping crime—and this is the best way to do it. By helping people have better lives.”

  That’s not our job, the others snap. We’re not social workers. We’re prosecutors. Peggy Beckstrand, in particular, is vehement in opposing Hickey’s sentiments. Sure, she says, a lot of us wish we could make better homes for people. “But that’s not what we do. We’re at the bottom of the barrel. The DA’s Office cannot save all these people . . . Our job is to deal with the people who break the social contract. We’re the barrier between all the people in society who haven’t stepped over the line and who are abiding by the rules and the social contract, and the people who they’re afraid of—the ones who do step over the line. And what we need are the right tools to do that.”

  In that barren lineup room full of prosecutors, the debate over Juvenile Court has crystallized as clearly as it ever will, striking at the ambiguities inherent in a system that wants to both punish and heal. Just as the defense lawyer’s role is blurred in this place—is it really in an angry, violent, out-of-control kid’s best interest to walk him out the door on a dismissal?—so is the prosecutor’s role a difficult one to pin down. With young offenders, is it always in the interest of public safety to seek the prosecutor’s traditional solution—the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid’s lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?

  “Love isn’t going to fix these kids,” Peggy says of the major juvenile offenders. “By the time we step in, it’s too late for that. All we can do is protect the people who obey the rules. That’s our obligation.”

  “I disagree,” Hickey says. “Sure, we need to look for the sociopaths, and put them away. That’s got to be our role. But the rest, we’re still talking about children. The rest, they’re salvageable. That should be our role, too.”1

  · · ·

  The Los Padrinos Branch of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court where Jim Hickey works is so physically and philosophically different from the Inglewood courthouse inhabited by Roosevelt Dorn and Peggy Beckstrand that it hardly seems part of the same judicial system. It lies not in a neighborhood crippled by violence and poverty, but in a serene corner of the city of Downey, a bedroom community on the southeastern edge of Los Angeles County. The juvenile crimes tried here are often serious—there are gang shootings and murders and other acts of unchildish children. Richard Perez had his fitness hearing here, and George Trevino. But, by and large, the cases here are not quite so relentlessly scary as the Inglewood docket. The prosecutors, judges, and defenders are not constantly at war here, either, finding more room for compromise, primarily because of the even, understanding tone set by Jim Hickey. Even this courthouse’s name sets it apart, the only juvenile branch in the LA system where the officials in charge of such things chose a lyrical name instead of a functional one: Los Padrinos. The Godfathers.

  Its locatio
n is as oddly out of place as its euphemistic name, surrounded not by gang turf, but sandwiched between a complex of squarish gray condominiums and a municipal golf course whose duffers occasionally pelt the blockish courthouse and its attached detention hall with wayward golf balls. None of the barely controlled chaos that reigns in Inglewood can be found here. Parents, children, and witnesses are relegated to a large waiting area with rows of uncomfortable brown molded-plastic chairs to hold them. Loudspeakers summon participants one case at a time, instructing parents and minors to pass by a guard desk and through black metal double doors, then to follow one of three colored lines imprinted in the scuffed black linoleum floor, yellow, red, and green. Each line leads to a heavy black metal fire door and a small courtroom beyond, so there is no confusion over room numbers, departments, or layout. Literacy is not required.

  Off to the side, skirted by the procession of kids and parents following lines on the floor, is Jim Hickey’s office, a large room with a bank of desks for two secretaries and two clerks, a chaotic file room, several side offices for prosecutors to share, and one private office in back, piled high with papers—Hickey’s.

  Usually, the door remains open to Hickey’s private office, but today it is closed. The head prosecutor is talking with a man named Luis Silvestre, whose stepson has been murdered. Hickey is prosecuting two boys for the killing, intent on sending them to adult court.

  Alfred Clark had been waiting in line at a McDonald’s restaurant. Another boy had cut in front of him, then demanded he hand over his Sony Walkman CD player. Alfred had just tried to laugh it off. Alfred the high school senior honors student. Alfred the star athlete. Alfred the kid with the college scholarship and the girlfriend and the classmates and teachers who loved him, who was bound for great things. He never saw it coming.

  The bullet sliced through his aorta and he bled to death there on the floor of a fast-food restaurant, French fries scattered around him, his eyes pleading and filled with disbelief while all the other kids in line scattered. The seventeen-year-old kid who shot him and took his Walkman—it was worth barely a hundred dollars—was caught the next day, no question about his guilt. He had no remorse. His eyes were dead.