No Matter How Loud I Shout

by Edward Humes

  Juan Macias, the sixteen-year-old who drove the getaway car, who protested his innocence, who said he had no idea his homeboy was going to shoot anyone—but whose gang name was Scrappy, with a long arrest record for car theft, burglary, and armed robbery that belied his credibility—had been a tougher call. At first, it seemed he might be telling the truth. But then Hickey heard a witness say Scrappy had stood in McDonald’s and pointed Alfred out to the killer a few minutes before the shooting, and the prosecutor decided this boy should go to adult court as well.

  Alfred’s stepfather had come to all the hearings so far. He has stared into the bright eyes of the two accused killers, and felt a weary hate wash over him. He would see the case through to the end, a silent vigil for justice. Once, he had known nothing about gang wars or street crime or the ruthless coldness that drove young people to kill for no reason and to feel no regrets when they were through. He was a careworn man whose quiet, law-abiding life had not prepared him for any of this.

  Today, Luis has stayed after the hearing to talk with Hickey about his overwhelming feelings of loss and bewilderment, to find some sense in it, somehow. But he can’t. All he can talk about is what an incredible joy Alfred had been, tears streaming like they always do. Every day, he tells Hickey, he has to walk past the closed door of his son’s room, willing himself not to shudder. No one in his family has been inside that room since the murder, months ago now. It is not that they are keeping a shrine. They just can’t bear seeing Alfred’s trophies, his schoolbooks, the acceptance letter from UCLA sitting on top of his desk. It was too much. Easier to leave it be, just as Alfred left it.

  Only another parent can really understand this thing that has happened, this feeling that you just cannot go on, Luis says. “That’s why I can talk to you. You have children.” The portrait Luis has painted of his son is so clear, the family’s anguish is so naked, that Jim Hickey is speechless. All he can do is nod, and clasp the man’s hand. And then grieving father and professional prosecutor simply sit in that tiny room in silence, faces wet, weeping together, while Hickey’s staff gamely tries not to look through the glass in the door.

  · · ·

  Later, Jim Hickey sits in his office discussing the future of juvenile justice, a subject that consumes much of his thought these days, as well as filling his desk with reports and clippings and memos. His feelings for the family of Alfred Clark and his desire to see the killers punished severely do not diminish his belief that most juveniles are salvageable. He still believes the main role of any prosecutor is to represent the point of view of people like Alfred Clark’s father. That holds just as true in Juvenile Court as in the adult system and, on this point, he and Peggy Beckstrand and all the other juvenile supervisors are in agreement. But there ought to be more to it than just that traditional focus, Hickey says. Juvenile Court demands more.

  Look at the kids who committed the Clark murder, he says. Look at Scrappy. He has been in the system for years. He was made a ward, put on probation, twice sent to camp, returned to probation afterward each time, then got in trouble again. Every time he was placed in a structured setting, he did well, with good grades, good behavior. But then he would return to the same impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood, the same lack of supervision at home, the same old homeboys urging him to return to his gang and his criminal ways. No one ever taught him all the little things you need to know to hold down a job: to be on time, to be dependable, not to call in sick all the time just because you don’t feel like working that morning. Sounds like basic stuff, but Hickey knows, the way every other professional in the juvenile system knows, that the kids of Juvenile Court tend to be bereft of these basics—that’s one reason why they have such lousy records in school.

  Scrappy was bright, he had potential, Hickey says sadly. “But we didn’t do the job we needed to do with him. He did his time, and that was it. And now one boy is dead, and two others are headed to life in prison. Everyone loses.”

  Then Hickey talks about another case, a kid who has a virtually identical criminal record as Scrappy, same age, grew up in the same sort of decayed neighborhood, experienced the same failure in school despite innate intelligence—a hardened gang member who never cared, one crime away from an adult prison term himself. Hickey is talking about Andre. The one difference between the two boys: Scrappy came home from camp and attended a run-of-the-mill court school where delinquent kids are warehoused all day because mainstream schools won’t admit them. But Andre went to the Rosewood School, where delinquents work with handicapped children in addition to going to class—where he met a little girl in a wheelchair named Miriam. Scrappy is now going down for murder. Andre has moved up three grade levels in six months, is about to graduate high school, has gone straight for more than a year, and is in line for a job as a county clerk.

  “It’s a question of approach,” Hickey says, scoffing at the newly popular military-style boot camps and the latest fad promoted by California lawmakers—taking gangbangers to the morgue to see murder victims. “These kids are already hard. They don’t need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They’ve lost that. That’s what we need to give back to them.

  “We need to soften them up.”

  When expounding this theme, Hickey often sounds more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor. In part, this owes to his love of children, his belief in the bedrock principle of Juvenile Court—that most kids can be saved. He embraces this philosophy personally as well as professionally. The walls of his office are filled with pictures of his family—three children he and his wife have adopted abroad, kids who were orphaned to the merciless shanty neighborhoods of Brazil, where vigilantes sanctioned (and sometimes joined) by the police have been known to execute homeless urchins as if they were vermin. “They are my sweethearts,” he says. “My joy.” He is a strong believer in the power of voluntarism, in the healing ability simple caring and reaching out can accomplish, which is why he devotes so much of his time and effort as a DA to working with school boards and community agencies—trying to stop the cycle of delinquency in its earliest stages.

  “When people stop caring, you get the kind of situation they have in Brazil, where children are killed and no one cares,” he says. “I don’t mean to suggest that could ever happen here, but we are becoming increasingly callous about children, and it troubles me. . . . Children in certain parts of our city are gunned down regularly. But where is the outrage? Where are our priorities?”

  Hickey remembers trying a juvenile murder case years ago, before a Superior Court judge downtown. The case boiled down to one underpaid prosecutor versus one underpaid public defender, with no money for expert witnesses, or clerks, or researchers—a typical Juvenile Court scenario, then and now. In the same courtroom that day, the judge was hearing motions in a libel case filed by a well-known vacation resort, whose board of directors objected to an article in Penthouse magazine linking the resort’s owners to organized crime figures. Six lawyers, well-dressed and making hundreds of dollars an hour, came to the hearing, backed up by an array of clerks, paralegals, and toadies of all sorts.

  “It seemed really poignant to me,” Hickey recalls. “Here we were, just the two of us, trying to decide this young man’s fate, a capital crime, supposedly the most serious thing our system has to deal with, and here they were, a porno magazine and a spa for the wealthy, with all these resources at work. There was the system’s priorities, for all to see. The judge couldn’t wait to get us out of there, couldn’t wait to get to the ‘good stuff.’ All the judges know the score. If they want to retire from the bench and be invited in as a partner in a good firm, or get into the lucrative world of private court for civil cases, you can’t get there from Juvenile Court. The best and the brightest, except for a very few, don’t want to be here. And, believe me, they’re not. As much as we need them, they don’t want to be here.”

  To Hickey’s way of thinking, the Rosewood School’s spe
cial program, in its own small way, reverses these priorities by conferring profound responsibilities onto children unaccustomed to being trusted to do anything. He tries to get every kid he can into Rosewood. “These are street thugs, serious offenders, some of the worst kids who come through here. Most of them have served time in camp or at the Youth Authority, and they’re harder than ever. Then they end up feeding and bathing autistic and wheelchair-bound kids, working with them intensively, having these handicapped folks depending on them utterly. It works a kind of magic. It softens them. For the first time in their lives, someone is dependent on them. And it changes them. It’s been going for four years, there’s never been a problem, never anyone neglected or hurt. Rival gang members go there and work together side by side. Sometimes it seems like a miracle.

  “There’s just one problem. After a while, they graduate. Then they go back to where they were before. And the forces that made them criminals are stronger and more varied. The empathy they learn can vanish in a moment. But all you have to do is see the accomplishments of this program. That is the sort of initiative the system needs. That is what the system of the future ought to be looking at. Taking these kids and softening them up.”

  · · ·

  The Rosewood School occupies a large storefront in a tidy strip mall in the suburb of Bellflower, surrounded by a health club, insurance offices, a bookstore—a typical shopping center. There is one large room equipped with desks, computers, books, and a couple of blackboards, manned by two teachers working with twenty-seven students, all of them on probation, most of them boys. It is clean and bright, with hot lunches served free to the kids and a loosely structured lesson plan that allows each child to progress at his or her own pace. Most of the students are junior or senior high school age, yet many function at little more than a third- or fourth-grade level academically. A careful interview process screens out boys and girls unwilling to give the special program a sincere try; those willing to commit themselves can jump two or three grade levels in a few months. The goal here, like other court schools, is to have students earn enough credits to receive a diploma, or to build their academic skills—and their behavior—to the point where a regular high school will take them back, so they can have proms and SATs and all the things these kids once considered out of reach. Rosewood has a success rate about twice as good as other court schools—there are still plenty of failures, but more kids make it here than elsewhere.

  The major difference between Rosewood and the other court schools becomes apparent at midmorning, when the students climb onto a small bus and head a short distance to the PACE school, where the disabled children await them. Supervised by counselors, the delinquents quickly attach themselves to groups of PACE students, taking some to eat, helping others in class, working as teacher’s aides. For most of the Rosewood kids, their visits here represent the first time they have been relied upon to help another person, the first time they have been told that what they have to offer is worth something, the first time school has done something other than make them feel inferior. It is a small success, helping a paraplegic child eat a piece of toast, and yet one success seems to lead to another for some kids. If I can do this, some say, maybe I can do better in class, too. Not all of them make this leap, but many do.

  Today, Andre and several other boys from Rosewood lead a procession of kids to the supermarket to buy groceries, helping them to choose packages, to use coupons, to pay at the register. En route this morning, Andre notices that one sixteen-year-old brain-damaged boy named Richard has adjusted his oversized trousers to ride low on his hips—imitating the “saggin’ and baggin’ ” gang members he has seen in the neighborhood with their fondness for wearing pants and shirts ten sizes too big for their frames.

  “Hey, no baggin’ around here,” Andre says, exchanging mock punches and feints with the boy, making Richard grin. “You think you’re bad? You don’t want to dress like that. Take it from me.”

  Richard looks sheepish when Andre yanks his pants up and cinches his belt, but then they shake hands and continue shopping, Andre’s arm draped easily over the other boy’s shoulder.

  “I can’t believe that’s the same kid who walked in here, but that’s the power of what we’re doing,” whispers Cedric Anderson, one of the teachers at Rosewood. When he first met Andre, the boy said his parents had given up on him, told him right to his face that he’d never amount to anything. Their communication with their son, like most of the kids Cedric teaches, had deteriorated to little more than yelling and punishing. “He was as hard as they come,” Cedric says, putting his arm around Andre and dishing out the praise that is dished out as often at possible at Rosewood. “Now he has gone from a heart of stone to a heart of feelings, from hard core to soft core. He’s going to make it—a kid whose own parents had written him off. I have no doubt he’s going to make it.”

  Andre returns to his desk to complete some math problems, and the smile fades from Cedric’s face. The future worries him. So far, no attempt has been made to replicate the Rosewood program that he and another teacher cobbled together, Cedric says, unable to conceal the bitterness in his voice. Its budget is in constant jeopardy, in line far behind programs geared more toward punishment than rehabilitation and prevention. Nor is it a model that the reformers are particularly interested in these days. The other court schools have not attempted to replicate the program. The Probation Department isn’t interested. Juvenile judges outside of Los Padrinos haven’t even heard of it.

  Prosecutor Jim Hickey may believe in Rosewood and in the need to soften up tough kids, but the message is not being heard. His boss, DA Garcetti, has concluded his meetings and has become interested in creating a new system that would remove the worst kids from Juvenile Court, treating them like adults in a two-tiered system that punishes the worst offenders severely, and reserves the social services for the most minor offenders.2 Kids like Andre would either straighten out after their first offenses—something Andre did not do—or get booted into the adult system under this plan.

  As Los Angeles DA Gil Garcetti’s juvenile point man, Dave Disco, explains it, the premise for creating a two-tiered system is based in part on a simple notion: Murder, whether by children or adults, as well as other violent crimes, should not be treated like an application for social services. Seventy-five percent of the cases in Los Angeles Juvenile Court are felonies. That’s not what the founding fathers of juvenile justice had in mind when they created a system intent on rehabilitation rather than punishment. The founders didn’t know that the behavior problems that most concerned school principals would shift in the last three decades from running in the halls and talking in class to carrying firearms and assaults on teachers.3

  This two-tiered premise calls for reserving Juvenile Court only for the sorts of kids it was originally intended to serve, the hubcap thieves and shoplifters, and sending all the others—even the very young—to adult court, or something very much like it. It is in theory a sensible approach, cost-effective, fairly simple, and politically expedient. It might even work, at least for some of the kids, though it requires society to simply give up on an extraordinary number of its children. For in this system of the future—to be offered for study and possible adoption by the state legislature—kids who can be salvaged will be treated no differently from kids who are hopeless.4

  In this system of the future, Andre and Miriam would never have met.

  · · ·

  The Los Angeles County Probation Department’s administration, with its study of Juvenile Court ineffectiveness and the 16 percent of delinquents who wreak havoc on the system in hand, wants to mold a very different sort of reform: not to give up on the worst of the worst, but to figure out who they are before they get in serious trouble, then throw everything the system has at them before it’s too late. In such a system, most offenders—the 84 percent who do not become career criminals—would neither need nor get much in the way of services. Precious money and manpower would be saved to th
row at the remaining kids who really need it. In this way, the child, not the crime, would determine what happens when a kid enters the system.5

  The task of figuring out how to identify these worst kids before they do much of anything bad—a feat of behavioral prophecy that has eluded juvenile justice experts for ninety-five years—has in Los Angeles fallen to a soft-spoken former probation officer named Roy Sukoda. He firmly believes in creating a system that does not give up on any child, a core of optimism he retains even though the numbers he has been crunching from his department’s three-year study get more dismal every day. Other than a handful of select juvenile justice professionals he addresses during occasional briefings, few in the system—and virtually none outside it—have ever heard of this man. But more than anyone in Los Angeles, Roy Sukoda has in hand the information needed to save—or to destroy—Juvenile Court.

  “The Sixteen Percenters,” as he calls the kids who account for most juvenile crime, “are shunted aside from the start. Typically, they start out demanding a lot of attention in school, behavior problems, academic problems, they disrupt. Gradually, they get shunted aside. That’s the first time. Then when they reach age nine to eleven, maybe twelve, they commit a crime, usually a low-grade misdemeanor. At that point, there is a tendency to overlook the offense. The police counsel and release him without making an arrest, or the Probation Department looks at the case and decides to give the minor a break. That’s the second time they are pushed aside. This is not such a break, though. In fact, that young person might have been better off being provided services then and there, intensive probation, supervision, special classes, counseling—something to keep them from becoming habitual offenders. But the opposite is done.”