by Edward Humes
“When we punish cold-blooded killers, their age shouldn’t matter,” he declares, as the probation officers and teachers who run Juvenile Hall—and whose livelihood depends upon the fact that the age of offenders does matter—shift from foot to foot in uncomfortable silence. “If you commit an adult crime, you’ll do adult time.”
It is a message that resonates, one that few citizens and even fewer politicians would care to challenge. This is why the Ronald Duncan case arouses such fury—there is no logic in treating fifteen-year-old cold-blooded killers differently from sixteen-year-old ones. Wilson has picked an issue on which he cannot lose. But the governor conveniently neglects to mention a few facts that seriously undermine his pitch: namely, that the grieving mothers present today were victimized by juveniles who were over sixteen. All of them got shipped to adult court and life prison sentences under existing, supposedly lax laws.
Nor does Wilson mention that the new law he is pushing—which would lower the fitness age so fourteen year-olds could be considered adults—would not stop with murderers, but would wipe out whole swaths of Juvenile Court jurisdiction, allowing even some burglars to be transferred to adult court at age fourteen. Nor is it made clear that the two most outspoken of the three moms on hand—imported to this LA affair from conservative (and soon to be bankrupt) Orange County to the south—are angry not because killers are getting away with murder, but because some child murderers tried as adults get to spend the first part of their sentences in the California Youth Authority, away from older, predatory inmates in adult prison, until they are old enough or tough enough to avoid being assaulted and raped by older inmates.
Never mind that the importance assigned to juvenile murderers in the debate over the future of Juvenile Court is wildly out of proportion to their numbers. Murders make up less than 1 percent of all juvenile cases—and as many as 94 percent of those teen killers are over sixteen, which means the vast majority of juvenile murderers and other violent delinquents can be (and usually are) dispatched to adult court with no trouble under existing laws.2 Sending fourteen- and fifteen-year-old murderers to adult court would address isolated outrages like Ronald Duncan, but it is not the big fix Wilson represents it to be. Statistically, it would have exactly no impact on crime, which is why the proposed legislation has quietly been expanded to include far less popular provisions, such as sending fourteen-year-old burglars to adult prison. It is also why Wilson brought with him mothers whose children were shot by sixteen-year-olds—that’s all he could find. Wilson has stacked the guest list in his favor to avoid any dissent or disharmony, and such bothersome details never come up.
The moment provides some terrifically emotive film clips to add to the governor’s television campaign spots—and to file away for the disastrous presidential bid Wilson has brazenly promised not to pursue (and which he would wholeheartedly pursue six months later, a lifelong politician selling himself unsuccessfully as an angry Republican outsider). On the muddy quadrangle of grass not far from the U-shaped, two-story brick buildings that house Geri, Elias, Scrappy, Carla, and all the other boys and girls who call this lockup home, Wilson’s entourage of campaign aides scramble to check camera angles and bark into cellular phones, sweating profusely in their suits and ties and dark business dresses as Wilson exhorts the media to carry forth his message about the need to crack down on “young predators,” a message he repeats time and again a year later during his presidential bid.
Across the field and safely out of the way, locked down in their rooms during the governor’s visit, the kids he is speaking about peer through the scratchy portals of unbreakable acrylic in their rooms, windows etched by layer upon layer of initials and gang logos, noses and hands pressed against the panes as they try to make sense of the spectacle below. They know only too well that, though this is a party in their honor, they are not welcome to attend. Even the outspoken director of Juvenile Hall, who opposes Wilson’s legislative proposals, is off the guest list at his own facility. There is only one thing the governor didn’t count on.
Somehow, Sister Janet Harris got herself an invitation.
“What in the way of prevention programs are you proposing in all this legislation?” she asks during what was billed as a roundtable discussion, though none of the participants were actually expected to ask Wilson anything remotely controversial. Janet has the kind of voice that is both firm and soft, making you strain just a little to hear, which has the curious effect of giving her words more, not less, power. “And why are young people charged with burglary included in this law?”
Wilson looks uncomfortable, but only for a moment. Prevention is an important part of dealing with juvenile crime, of course, he says. And the best form of prevention is to get the message across that “adult crimes carry adult price tags.” He has managed to get back on point, the consummate politician.
But one of the mothers—the only one from Los Angeles—will not let Wilson evade Janet’s question so easily. To everyone’s surprise, she says, “I think prevention and rehabilitation is crucial, not just cracking down on these kids. And I don’t think burglary belongs in there, either. I think that’s going too far.”
“Well, I believe burglary belongs in the bill. But that’s certainly something that will be debated,” Wilson says lamely, knowing that the legislation is on the fast track in Sacramento, and that legislators are falling over one another to see who can out-tough the others in cracking down on juvenile crime. It is an unplanned and uncomfortable moment, and the entourage reacts quickly with much glancing at watches. There’s another campaign speech in an hour, the aides announce that it is time to go, and the discussion abruptly ends.
But before Wilson and his people stride off to their waiting limousines, while he is still circulating among the guests and bidding them farewell, Sister Janet materializes by the governor’s arm. His hand shoots out reflexively to grip hers, warm and firm, a smile fixed on his face as Janet leans close and whispers that she is praying for him and the other leaders of California to find ways to improve the juvenile justice system with compassion and wisdom. Many boys and girls who languish behind bars could be saved, she tells him, if only the people in power wanted it that way. He looks uncomfortable again, but he still nods and smiles, then thanks her. “I think we’re going to accomplish that with these new, tougher laws,” he says automatically, then turns briskly away. The newspaper and TV people immediately begin packing up for the next stop on the campaign trail as the governor and his staff race off, accidentally abandoning one of their grieving mothers in the process.
A television reporter sidles up to Janet then and says quietly out of the corner of her mouth, “What a dog and pony show.”
“Put that down for the record,” Janet replies. “Please.”
· · ·
There is a story about Sister Janet Harris. It dates back to the seventies, when Los Angeles County received a small federal grant to start a program to reform gang kids, and someone decided to put Sister Janet in charge. (Her guidance in this task: “Here’s a desk, Sister, and a phone. Get to work.”) She wanted to set up jobs and mentors and school programs for current and would-be gang members, but she needed support from the city of Los Angeles, which meant seeking out then-mayor Tom Bradley’s help. She thought a former cop turned politician with humble roots, one of the first black mayors of a major U.S. city, would be happy to throw his support toward a program designed to keep poor and underprivileged kids from joining gangs and turning to crime. But Bradley—or at least his staff—rebuffed Sister Janet for months.
Then one night she spotted Bradley’s unmistakable broad shoulders and blocky silhouette in a Beverly Hills restaurant. On impulse, she got down on her knees and crept toward him across the crowded restaurant, hands clasped in supplication, to convince him to participate in her gang program. “I’m begging you to help these boys,” Sister Janet said, planting her elbows next to his wineglass, the mayor and his dinner companions gaping in astonishment.
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br /> She laughs ruefully at the memory now, a trifle embarrassed, but not the least apologetic. “It was important. And I wanted him to hear me.” The mayor heard her, all right, and then, as Janet tells it, turned her down flat, leaving orders to keep Sister Janet away from him.
But someone else took an interest in Sister Janet’s ideas and dedication—the former football great and actor Rosie Greer, who went on to become a minister. Greer, in turn, got Jackie Kennedy to show up a short time later to help raise funds for the gang program. The former First Lady ended up cruising the barrio with Janet in Greer’s station wagon, littered with soda cans and fast-food wrappers. Before attending a press conference and a fund-raiser, Greer, Janet, and Jackie O. stopped in the barrio to play dominoes with gang members.
“The program really took off after that,” Janet recalls. “I’ve been doing this ever since.”
Sister Janet Harris is a youthful and slim sixty-three, with short silver hair, pale blue eyes behind metal-rimmed spectacles, and a manner that at times seems distracted, so immersed is she in the daily lives of the inhabitants of Juvenile Hall. Her workdays begin early and end late, filled with recruiting volunteers, organizing dances, planning church services and Bible study groups, staging plays and musicals, and lining up alternative lawyers and social workers for kids who have little contact with the professionals appointed to represent them. She spends hours a day roaming the different units in the lockup, and can only rarely be found in the cramped and chilly chaplain’s office adjacent to the Juvenile Hall chapel. Still, her office is one of the few places on the grounds where the door stands open and unlocked throughout the day. Though theft is endemic in this place, her office has never been victimized.
She never planned on becoming an advocate for dispossessed children. As a teenager living in the Bronx, Janet had been an aspiring actress. Her father always told her she’d be on the stage someday. But on the eve of a critical audition for a Broadway play, just when those ambitions were close to being realized (or dashed, she says now), she decided against pursuing show business. Instead, she joined an order of nuns in California, the Sisters of the Presentation, where she took her vows, then attended the University of San Francisco. (Many people saw the two career choices as utterly contradictory, but not Janet, who as a nun went on to earn a master’s degree in filmmaking and has collaborated on several movie projects, including helping with the film Zoot Suit.)
After college, Janet took a teaching assignment at a Catholic elementary school in an East Los Angeles barrio. Next to her convent stood a foster home for chronically delinquent boys, and it was here that Janet found her calling. A half hour of volunteer work at the foster home each day after school soon blossomed into three hours and weekends, time that left her energized and wanting more. She began spending time with gang kids, at first on her own, then through the LA County antigang program. She avoided the standard approach the church had always used with gang members and their families—Scriptures, preaching, prayer, penance—focusing instead on finding work for gang members, helping them get into junior colleges and trade schools, pairing them with volunteers and mentors who could offer them alternatives to violence and crime.
Gang members were at first dubious of this meddling white nun from New York. But when she refused to betray a confidence to police detectives seeking information on a gang killing—risking jail herself when the angry investigators accused her of obstructing justice—Janet gained enormous respect from the Latino gang members she was trying to reach. Several eventually came forward themselves with information for the police in order to spare her the handcuffs.
In the 1980s, Janet left the streets and began working in juvenile halls and, in 1989, she became chaplain at Central Juvenile Hall, becoming one of the few points of consistency the kids here recognize. Consistency is no small issue: Odds are a repeat offender will get a different judge, a new lawyer, another prosecutor, and a new series of probation officers (one to evaluate him before his arrest, another to investigate him before his sentencing, yet another to supervise him once he’s back on the street). In theory, the court file is supposed to provide consistency that the human component lacks, a body of knowledge that helps the system avoid starting from scratch each time a child walks in the door. In practice, though, most judges and lawyers haven’t the time or inclination to read anything in the file beyond the most recent piles of paper (the information superhighway has no on-ramps to Juvenile Court—in many respects it remains a manually typed, carbon-copy world, circa 1961). A ward’s history before the court is often ignored or misplaced, especially when more than one branch of the court is involved (and worse still when there is a different jurisdiction). Continuity, cooperation, communication, even the mere sharing of files is an iffy thing between the disparate parts of the sprawling LA Juvenile Court—dozens of files, the complete and irreplaceable record of a child’s life, are misplaced every month. Some of the ten branches of the court simply refuse to send them, and judges elsewhere have their clerks create “dummy” files, a name that aptly summarizes the sparse contents of such makeshift remedies. Kids who want to hide their pasts can do so easily, simply by slightly modifying a birth date or a name. At the same time, children who want and need help, and whose past should help them get it, are passed over—which is why a George Trevino, with his eight years as a ward of the Juvenile Court’s dependency branch, could be hustled into the delinquency side of the court and be treated as if he had no history in the system at all.
These sorts of communication breakdowns work both ways. To most kids, the Juvenile Court is nothing more than a long stay in a dank holding cell, followed by a few minutes in a bright and noisy courtroom full of nameless faces speaking a legalistic language they can’t follow. When the lockup bus brings them back to the hall, often after eight at night, many cannot say for certain the purpose of the hearing that brought them to court, or the name of the judge or the prosecutor they faced that day, or even the name of the lawyer representing them. But a good number of them know Sister Janet’s name. They know if they ask her for help, she will do her best, no questions asked. They know she does not condone their crimes or violence, yet she still invests countless hours and endless effort on their behalf, trying to eke some measure of individual treatment out of a system that is best at crafting blanket solutions for the many. She makes a distinction between being a gang member and being a criminal, because, unlike virtually every other worker in the system, Janet has known many gang members who have never been arrested or accused of a crime. If the kids here take away nothing else from their stay in Juvenile Hall, those who come to know Sister Janet leave certain of one thing: that at least one person cares what happens to them.
For all too many, Janet has found, this is a new and startling revelation.
· · ·
“This is just not acceptable,” Sister Janet is saying to George Trevino this afternoon, her voice shaking with anger as they sit together in an empty classroom in the hall’s school building. “I am not going to let this go.”
George nods, glad to have Janet as an ally, but he also shrugs, the expression of a kid conditioned to accept as inevitable the hard realities of a system charged with both sustaining and restraining him. “It’s okay,” George says quietly, reversing roles and comforting Janet.
“No, it’s not all right, George. Those poems are precious. They are important. They mean something.”
As often happens with the personal possessions of the kids imprisoned here, the Juvenile Hall staff has lost George’s poems. A bound and typeset version of twenty-five poems George painstakingly assembled is missing after a seemingly admiring supervisor on his unit asked to borrow it, then misplaced the boy’s most prized possession. A few weeks earlier, his handwritten originals were seized as contraband and lost by the hall staff, making today’s loss all the more devastating to the boy. Sister Janet has raised such a stink that the administration has begun searching every room and every boy and girl in the p
lace, all nine hundred of them, assuming someone stole them, though Janet suspects the supervisor’s carelessness is a more likely culprit. The same staff person had, months earlier, begged Janet to round up some donated books to give the kids. Janet spent the next several weeks pulling together a small library of several hundred paperbacks, which she then had delivered to the lockup’s loading dock with the help of several volunteers. Three weeks later, Janet asked a boy if he had gotten access to the new books. “What new books?” the kid replied. Janet then learned that the supervisor had never bothered to fetch the donated books, though she had been told of their arrival immediately, and the residents of the hall had been clamoring for reading material for many days. When Janet went to see what had become of the books, she found them still sitting in open boxes outside on the unsheltered concrete dock, rotting and ruined by a month of rain and sun.
“The indifference so many of the staff here show these kids is incredible,” Janet says, wanting George to understand that he has not been singled out. A day earlier, she tells George, one of the boys in the writing class, Chris, convicted of robbing a pizza man with several other juveniles—one of whom shot and wounded the pizza man at the conclusion of the robbery—was told to come over to his unit supervisor’s desk. “Here,” a detention officer told him, thrusting a dirty, used manila envelope at him without looking up from the paperwork on his desk. “This is yours.”
Chris had been working all year to make up for his past truancy and school problems, earning high grades and completing all the credits needed for a high school diploma—an academic achievement not all that common in this place. His teachers have been encouraging him to think about college. He had been expecting some sort of graduation ceremony, some small recognition, but when he opened up the tattered envelope just handed him, he saw it contained his diploma. No congratulations, no handshake. This is a kid who grew up in the street, whose loved ones have been claimed by prison, murder, and suicide, who has no one but his keepers to look to for some measure of approval. “You could just see him shut down when he realized what the staff thought of his accomplishment,” Janet says. “The thrill of his achievement—and it is quite an achievement here—just drained right out of him.”