by Edward Humes
· · ·
Twenty-five years ago, when Los Angeles’s Watts ghetto neighborhoods erupted in riots, Sharon Stegall was a sixteen-year-old girl surveying the rubble that had been the grocery story where she had worked after school. As she stood there astride her bicycle, gaping at the desolation, a policeman suddenly appeared, gun drawn, shouting, “For the flip of a quarter, nigger bitch, I’d blow your head off.”
She never knew if the cop took her to be a looter, or if he was simply motivated by a racist hatred. But she survived that day, though it colors her work as a probation officer—she knows her kids face the same sort of situations even now, children for whom violence appears from all sides, children for whom there are no good guys. The neighborhoods are war zones. Gangs lay claim to them. Policemen eye them not as kids, but as potential threats. They all know what “Assume the position” means, without having to see it in movies or on TV. Sharon visits her probationers and sees their little brothers and sisters playing not house or doctor or fireman, but drug dealer, crack house, and bank robber—their heroes and role models. Little kids actually standing there passing play money and bogus rocks of cocaine to one another over the counter, then pretending to smoke or shoot. She has seen this with her own eyes, this last gasp of childhood fantasy, modeled after the most successful adults on the block.
By the time these kids end up on Sharon’s caseload, their ability to play and imagine can be completely destroyed. She sees it every day, the anger that wells up in some of her probationers when she asks them where they’ll be in five years. They balk at the question, refuse to answer, but when she pushes them, all too many say, “Dead. Okay? Can I go now?”
There’s the problem, Sharon figures. Most of her kids have no imagination left. They have no play in them, no power to see possibilities beyond the moment. And if you can see no future, if you expected to be dead by age twenty-one, what was the point of caring about anything? What was the point of having a conscience or feeling sorry for anyone you hurt if you were terminally ill? Sharon’s probationers—like the kids Sister Janet meets in the hall—tell her that all the time, that it doesn’t matter what they do, because they are, in essence, dead already. And this hopelessness, this living death, does not stop in the barrios and ghettos—she and her colleagues hear the same thing from the rich suburban kids, from children of privilege, even from the sons of two Juvenile Court bench officers. This is what makes so many of the kids of Juvenile Court so incredibly hard, so resistant to reform. This is what concerns Sharon the most.
And so she sees a good part of her job as rekindling in her kids a more wholesome ability to imagine, to grasp at a brighter future—giving them back something that should be innate. She tries to show them a different side of the system, a new realm of possibilities—that a black woman from Watts once threatened by a policeman’s gun simply because of her race could go on to work as a federal park ranger and forester at Yosemite, as she had before becoming a probation officer. She tells them to drive down a certain street where they can see the name Stegall on a school building—her mother, an honored former teacher, had an entire school named after her, she informs them with pride. She talks to kids who have never strayed from their barrios about how she has traveled the world, started her own business. She shows them that Jaguar she drives. “I’ve done things these kids can only dream of,” Sharon says, then corrects herself. “No, I’ve done things these kids can’t dream of. That’s what I’m up against. That’s what I try to change.”
It is what she almost finished doing with Li’l Dondi. It is what she is desperately trying to do with Carla James.
· · ·
The courtroom is half full as Commissioner Gary Polinsky tries to sort through his clogged calendar. Sharon sits in the jury box waiting for her violation cases to be called—Jesus with his bag of crack and worried dad, and Carla James, with her tattooed stomach and infuriating resistance to change. The first case with Jesus should be an easy one, but Carla has charmed this Juvenile Court commissioner before. Sharon is worried she’ll pull off another successful manipulation of the system.
First, though, there is an arraignment to be held. Sharon watches with interest as Polinsky tells his bailiff to bring out a fifteen-year-old boy named Kelvin Smith, known on the street as Doughnut, a classic repeat offender long ignored by the system, with ten arrests since age eleven for theft, burglary, battery, and trespass. The Sixteen Percenter pattern holds true in his case: Most of the early charges invariably were dismissed or dropped or led to minimal probation, allowing him to continue hanging with the Hoover Street Crips gang he idolized, committing more crimes, becoming a child with no imagination, one of LA’s living dead. He could barely read at the second-grade level.
After his eighth arrest, Doughnut had finally landed in probation camp, where he failed miserably but was still released after five months to make room for older, more serious offenders. One day later, he stole a car and was arrested driving it. Yet, once again, despite his long record, he was released, still on probation, though he had never in four years obeyed a single probation condition or court order. His record was such a jumble, and his offenses sufficiently “minor,” the system just couldn’t find time to deal with Doughnut.
Now, six months later, his car theft charge still unresolved, he is back in court, this time accused of participating in the ambush of Sharon’s probationer, Li’l Dondi. The Juvenile Court’s abject failure had shot down one of its budding successes. Time for the system to pay attention to Doughnut.
At the moment, life support machines continue to keep Li’l Dondi’s heart and lungs going, so the charge against Doughnut remains attempted homicide. But the first-degree murder papers have already been drawn up and are sitting in Peggy Beckstrand’s office, waiting to be filed the moment Dondi dies, an epitaph for a sixteen-year-old written in advance of the inevitable. Seeing those papers gave Sharon chills, like seeing a tombstone carved for someone still living.
Slouching in a seat in the middle of the gallery is a tall, ponytailed man in a nylon baseball jacket. He is talking quietly with a woman whose face is contorted in anguish. The man is Hawthorne Police Detective James Royer, who beeped Sharon with the news about Li’l Dondi, and who later helped arrest and interrogate Doughnut. Sharon figures at first that the grieving woman must be Dondi’s mother, but it turns out she is Doughnut’s mother. She ought to be furious with Royer for bringing her son in, but she has no one else to turn to in this place—no lawyer to represent her interests, no familiar faces, nothing but fear of the unknown. In Juvenile Court, the defense lawyers represent the kids, not the parents. The defenders even instruct kids to refuse to talk about their cases with their mothers and fathers, for fear they could be subpoenaed by the prosecution and forced to testify (unlike the marital privilege that protects spouses from incriminating one another, there is no matching parental privilege). Nor can parents participate in any discussions between lawyer and child, even when decisions are made about strategies that will profoundly affect a child’s future—an ultimate irony in a court designed to bring families together. So Mrs. Smith has only Detective Royer to turn to.
In Hawthorne, he has a reputation as a fair man and a good cop, the sort who goes out of his way to help kids and families when he can, who tries to line up jobs for gang members who tire of the street life and who would gladly go straight if they could find any alternatives. Mrs. Smith views the system as so unfriendly that she is drawn to the man who arrested her son as her only ally. She is a single mother with two jobs and an abiding anger at a Juvenile Court she considers more an accomplice than a deterrent to her son’s deliquency. Now, after so many years of inaction, she complains, the system wants to hammer her boy.
“How can they charge my son with doing the shooting?” she asks Royer, her voice a trembling monotone.
“It’s called the felony murder rule,” the detective explains. “Like when someone sticks up a liquor store and shoots someone, the getaway driver g
ets charged, too.”
“But he didn’t shoot anybody,” Mrs. Smith complains. She already knew from Royer that only the two adult gang members with Doughnut actually pulled their triggers. Doughnut was armed with a handgun and present at the ambush of Li’l Dondi, but he never fired.
“I know he didn’t shoot, but he was still involved,” Royer tells the mother gently. “He’s still responsible.”
Mrs. Smith searches Royer’s eyes then, pleading with him for some sliver of hope. “But how do you know?”
Royer shrugs apologetically. “Because he told me.”
The woman grasps at one final straw, though her tone of voice makes it clear even she does not believe what she is suggesting. “Maybe he lied?”
Royer shakes his head sadly, as if to say he wished it were so. “Why would he lie? If he were going to lie, he would tell it the other way.” He sees Mrs. Smith nodding slightly, accepting it, accepting that her son is part of a murder. She looks ashen. Royer clears his throat and whispers, “Look at it this way. He’s fifteen. Good thing for him. It’s a premeditated death penalty case for an adult, but the worst that can happen to him is ten years. Consider him lucky.”
Mrs. Smith turns away, staring at the metal door her son will soon be walking through to enter the courtroom. She doesn’t look as if she feels very lucky. She speaks again to the detective. “He’s so scared, he has to have his night light on at night. What does that tell you?”
“I know what’s in his heart,” Royer agrees. “In his heart, he’s not a killer. But he did it anyway. In the interrogation, I told him I knew he hadn’t shot. He didn’t even know how to use that gun. He didn’t even know if it was loaded. So I said, ‘I know you didn’t want to kill that boy. Why’d you do it?’ And he says, ‘I didn’t want to look punked out in front of my homeboys.’ ” It is a common explanation for juvenile murders, and a prime reason Los Angeles saw nearly eight hundred killings by street gangs in the past year.
Doughnut’s mother shakes her head then, eyes closed. She doesn’t know what is worse: that her son could be in such trouble, or that somehow her own flesh and blood had gone so wrong that he believed the lesser of two evils was to participate in a murder rather than risk being jeered at by his friends. She is a young woman with smile lines in the corners of her mouth, but pain has etched new furrows in her face. Without looking at Royer, she asks very quietly, “How old was the guy who got shot?” She winces when Royer answers, “Sixteen.”
“The kid’s brain-dead,” Royer says. “Sooner or later, it’s going to be a murder charge.” He touches her shoulder until she looks him in the eye again. “Listen, if he tells the truth, he might get a deal, maybe he can get in some kind of facility and learn something. Otherwise, he’ll go to CYA till he’s twenty-five and come out a hardened gangster. They say it’s supposed to rehabilitate, but bottom line is, it’s prison. It’s not going to help him. You don’t want that to happen.”
“I told him that,” Mrs. Smith says. By her tone of voice, two things are clear: One, she trusts Royer on this, even though it is exactly the sort of thing cops always say to coax a confession; and, two, her son will not listen to her. He may not be a murderer at heart, but neither will he inform on his home boys. One of the reasons gangs recruit fifteen-year-olds like him to participate in capital crimes is their irrevocable status as juveniles. Doughnut cannot go to adult court. His homeboys will expect him to be a stand-up guy, protecting the two adults who could face death sentences.
When his case is called and he is brought in for arraignment, Doughnut doesn’t do himself much good. He spots his mother sitting with the detective and refuses to look at her again. The hearing is brief, consisting of a reading of the charges, a determination by Commissioner Polinsky that Doughnut should remain detained, and the appointment of an attorney after the public defender declares a conflict of interest in the case, having represented Li’l Dondi in the past. Throughout, Doughnut scowls, mutters angrily to himself, shifting impatiently in his seat.
Polinsky spots Doughnut mouthing an obscenity at the detention order. “Your client seems unhappy,” Polinsky angrily tells the newly appointed attorney. “He doesn’t seem to realize he is in here only by the grace of his age. This is going to take time, and he is not going to be released.” The commissioner then addresses the boy directly. “Do you understand?”
Chastened, Doughnut mumbles, “Yes, sir.” For the first time, he looks worried, as if it has just struck him that this time, his journey through the system will be a very different one. He has just realized that, even though he cannot be sent to an adult court or prison, ten years’ imprisonment in the California Youth Authority is a very long time.
A few moments later, he is escorted back to lockup. His mother waves, but he still will not acknowledge her, fear and defiance battling for control of his face. Sharon is glad to see Polinsky in a bad mood—she figures he will be less likely to fall for Carla’s glib charm today. As far as she is concerned, cases like Doughnut’s are a colossal waste of time, money, and effort because there is really no question where he will end up. There is an eyewitness and a confession. After six months or a year of delays, he will be convicted and go to CYA until he is twenty-five, or close to it. There is no other option for a fifteen-year-old accomplice to murder.
“It’s just the system spinnin’ its wheels,” she mutters under her breath. The cops and lawyers sitting with her in the jury box say nothing, sitting there in stalwart silence, oblivious to the too-familiar spectacle unfolding before them.
She listens as Detective Royer tells Polinsky about another case he has coming up that day—a sixteen-year-old forced by his mother and stepfather to sell cocaine. The kid’s dealing supports their drug habits, pays the rent, buys the groceries, he says. They encourage him to skip school. They even got him a gun to carry to protect his stash and their profits. Royer can make a case in Juvenile Court against the boy—the kid practically turned himself in, so desperate was he to escape his home—but the detective can’t get the adult court DA to prosecute the parents for child endangerment. Insufficient evidence, he was told. And the kicker is, he says, for the last year, this kid was on probation, supposedly supervised by the court and a PO. Yet no one ever visited the home to see how he was doing.
“The kid’s a classic victim,” Royer complains. “And he’s the only one that pays.”
It’s the kind of story that makes Sharon ashamed to admit what she does for a living.
· · ·
Carla James is led in next. As Sharon rises to recite her violations for the court record, the probation officer is gripped by the overwhelming premonition that, in watching Doughnut’s case, she has just witnessed an all-too-plausible preview of Carla’s fate. Unless something is done here and now, she decides, Carla is going to end up charged with murder herself, bound for a long term of imprisonment like Doughnut. Either that, or the next time Sharon’s beeper goes off at four in the morning, it’s going to be tolling Carla’s death, just as it had Li’l Dondi’s.
“This young lady is out of control, Your Honor,” Sharon tells Commissioner Polinsky, urgency in her voice. “She needs to be restrained.”
Polinsky leafs through Sharon’s report on Carla, then sees the Polaroid snapshot of the tattoo. He slams the file down and Carla, who had come in smiling, starts at the sound. He cuts off her explanations about it being her body, along with her sudden suggestion that she intends to have it surgically removed.
“You have come to the wrong court today, young lady,” the commissioner rails, eyes still wide behind his horn-rim glasses. “I have had it up to here.”
Carla watches as Polinsky returns to studying her file, each page turning with a sharp crackle of paper. The file is shaking in the judge’s hands, he is so agitated—Carla has never seen this side of him before. She was used to being treated like a teacher’s pet in Polinsky’s courtroom, and had been expecting a mild admonishment and a sentence back to camp. Camp doesn’t worry her:
She’d have plenty of friends there, and she’d be running the place again soon enough, she figures, like always. But then Polinsky surprises her.
“You know, I could just commit you to CYA right now. I have more than four years over your head. You’ve had more than enough chances to succeed, and I’m not sure what else to do with you.”
Carla stares at him openmouthed. She has heard stories about CYA. Carla’s lawyer is sputtering. Even Sharon is astonished. Six months in camp was the most she had hoped for. This does not sound like Commissioner Polinsky, who very seldom sends any but the most egregious, unrepentant failures to youth prison, and who had counted on Carla to become a bright spot on an otherwise depressing caseload.
But like many others in the Los Angeles juvenile system, Polinsky is frustrated by the paucity of options for sentencing kids. For the privileged few who have parents willing and able to pay for out-of-county or even out-of-state treatment programs, where the cost can run into the thousands very quickly, there are special college prep programs with locked campuses, wilderness programs, secure drug and alcohol programs, therapeutic schools tailor-made to fit certain kids’ needs—the possibilities are nearly endless. Judge Dorn is currently entertaining a proposal to sentence a young arsonist into a private program in another state—a kid who, had his father not been a wealthy physician, would have ended up in CYA. For kids with money behind them, justice—at least when it comes to sentencing—is for sale.
But for the vast majority of children sentenced in Los Angeles Juvenile Court—the Doughnuts and the Carlas and the Ronald Duncans—the county must foot the bill. And there are just four basic sentences for them.
There is HOP, by far the most common result in the thirty thousand delinquency cases brought to court each year. There is “suitable placement,” a network of public and private foster homes supervised by the Probation Department and reserved for about twenty-three hundred mostly nonviolent kids who cannot live with—or do not have—parents. Kids who are runaway risks usually cannot go to suitable placement—there is no security. Then there are the twenty-six detention camps run by the Probation Department for forty-four hundred kids in a variety of rural settings from the desert to Malibu—locked, rigorous facilities that are good at keeping gangbangers in line while they are inside, but not designed for kids with emotional, learning, or psychological problems, or drug or alcohol dependencies. (This is something of an oddity, since most juvenile delinquents have precisely these problems.)3 And the fourth and final option within the juvenile system is the California Youth Authority, the state’s massive system of juvenile prisons, the largest in the nation, where rehabilitation is the nominal mission for its eighty-seven hundred “wards,” but where gang wars, race riots, stabbings, and rapes are regular afflictions, mirroring, albeit to a smaller degree, the nightmarish world of America’s adult prisons.4