No Matter How Loud I Shout

by Edward Humes

  “Anyone who is telling you to go against the orders of your mother,” Dorn is railing, “must want you to be a prostitute.”

  The stirring throng in the gallery falls silent for a moment, straining to hear, a roomful of voyeurs picturing Dorn, cheeks inflated, glaring across his desktop at some child. The judge’s voice dips below audible, then rises again. “Mother, you file the necessary papers, and I’ll put you back in control. I promise you that. You think you know these streets, young lady? You know nothing. You don’t know it, but you are headed on a quick trip to the cemetery, or the penitentiary, one or the other.”

  The door opens a few moments later. A sullen teenaged girl stalks out without a word or a look back, her long braids bobbing as she strides from the room. Her head is high and she is wearing the classic teen sneer, that perfect look of supreme contempt for the adult world, whose values she rejects even as she claims its privileges. The girl’s mother follows like an attendant, face tight with embarrassment, eyes downward so that she need not meet anyone else’s glance in that courtroom—as if the other parents there do not know exactly what she is feeling, the pain and helplessness and bewildered humiliation. She lingers only long enough to accept some papers from Dorn’s probation officer and to mumble her thanks. She pushes out of the courtroom wearing the haunted look of someone who has just learned a loved one is terminally ill.

  “It doesn’t appear we’ve reached this young lady today,” Dorn says absently. “Perhaps some time in the hall will convince her.”

  Then, without apology or explanation, Dorn climbs back on the bench and shuffles files, ready to resume his scheduled hearings after the protracted delay. He stares unmoved at the irritated looks of the attorneys who have been waiting at the defense and prosecution tables during his absence, and who now suspect—correctly—that Dorn, once again, is going to work straight through lunch, right up to the point his court reporter’s hands cramp up into claws and she begs for a rest. The message is clear: Dorn’s informal in-chambers hearings are every bit as important to him as his official calendar. Perhaps more so.

  “Call the next case,” he says gruffly. His failure to cajole the girl into obedience has left him in a foul mood. He won’t take it out on the kids who come before him, but the lawyers know they are in for a rough time. They hate his informal sessions, which have become increasingly frequent, up to several a day now. The Star Chamber, they call it. Or the Inquisition.

  Dorn doesn’t care. He calls these meetings the juvenile system’s best chance to help families, and its surest hope for survival. They are the mainstay of his one-judge campaign to shift the priorities of Juvenile Court away from the formally charged repeat offenders and toward the kids teetering on the edge, the ones for whom violence and arrest, addiction or death, are clearly in the cards, but still—perhaps—avoidable.

  The girl he lectured in chambers today has just turned seventeen and is refusing to go to school or to observe any sort of curfew. She refuses the simplest request from her parents. She has been stealing from them and, they believe, using the money for drugs. They blame her older boyfriend, a gang member, for pushing her down this path—the fellow Dorn accused of trying to turn the girl into a prostitute.

  Her mother came to Dorn because she had heard through her church that he could step in when the police couldn’t or wouldn’t. When tackling such a case, the judge first tries a stern lecture, which, for many kids, is enough. Being hauled to that prisonlike courthouse, made to wait in the crowded courtroom, and then encountering a master of verbal intimidation like Dorn is enough to scare most kids. But if that fails, he tells the parents that he will help them bring a status offense case. All the parent has to do is fill out a complaint with the Probation Department and if a probation investigation confirms the problem, Dorn can use an old state law to declare the child incorrigible and put him or her on probation.

  This is how Dorn believes the court can become a tool for prevention, intervening before a child commits a real crime—even providing a way of targeting the Sixteen Percenters before they embark on their chain of offenses and are claimed by the terminal illness of delinquency.

  “Think of all the precious resources we can save by straightening these young people out now, before it’s too late,” he exhorts those who gripe about his plan. “Think about all the precious lives we can save. We can alter the lives of these minors, as well as their potential victims, for the better. This is the perfect prevention vehicle. But it is a lot of work, and so it has fallen out of favor. I hope to change that.”

  Later in the day, another status offender is brought before Dorn, this time a somewhat more malleable fourteen-year-old who has been staying out late and refusing his mother’s orders, having fallen under the influence of an eighteen-year-old gangbanger in his neighborhood. The boy enters the courtroom a small bundle of fury with a shaved head, kicking his legs angrily as he waits in a seat in the gallery, wedged between his mother and his pastor. Dorn deliberately has him sit there for more than two hours, watching cases, listening to the judge repeat his lectures about choosing between education and poverty, of cemeteries and penitentiaries. The boy watches Dorn reward the kids who succeed, who go to school and earn passing grades they have never earned before. And he watches the ample failures, child after child sent to camp and detention as Dorn ruthlessly enforces his personal standards of school attendance, of unexcused absences, of keeping one’s word and following the rules as laid down by Judge Dorn.

  After a while, the pastor whispers to the boy, “Don’t worry, your turn’s coming,” which, of course, instantly transforms the boy’s anger into fear, just as the minister intended. Finally, after revoking a young car thief’s probation for not going to school on time, Dorn greets the pastor and the boy’s mother warmly, frowns at the boy, then rises from the bench and ushers all three into his chambers as several defense lawyers waiting for their cases to be called groan audibly.

  Inside, Dorn lays it on thick with the boy, threatening him with detention if he does not straighten up—an idle threat at this point, since the boy has committed no crime and Dorn has no legal jurisdiction. (“But he doesn’t know that,” Dorn chuckles later.) Dorn also chides the boy for hurting his mother, for repaying her love with disrespect and contempt. “Why would you follow some reprobate in your neighborhood, who undoubtedly is going to end up in the penitentiary or worse, rather than your mother who loves you?”

  The joint appeal to conscience and fear, combined with the sobering sight of Dorn meting out justice for two hours, has the desired effect. The boy leaves a changed child, outwardly at least. In front of Dorn, he hugs and kisses his mother, then apologizes, promising to change his ways. Dorn congratulates him for his maturity, then orders him to stay away from the eighteen-year-old who has been leading him astray, lest he find out what Juvenile Hall looks like from the inside out. (“It’s not really an order at all,” Dorn admits later. “But he doesn’t know that.”)

  And so Judge Dorn, using the power of his robe and a heavy dose of intimidation, accomplishes what the law and the system normally cannot do: He puts a boy back on track. (A year later, the young man is doing well in school and has stayed out of trouble. His mother has no doubt about who deserves credit for that: Judge Dorn.)

  Dorn’s seemingly simple approach to preventing delinquency—the classic, paternalistic godfather role envisioned in the more innocent times that spawned Juvenile Court—was at the outset met with great skepticism throughout the system. First, there was the sense that kids today were just too sophisticated for lectures and tirades. And, beyond that, the bureaucracy that exists to screen cases and to select which kids enter the system, and which get to walk, is reluctant to cede its authority. Judge Dorn is setting up a wholly separate gateway to the system, one that bypasses the Probation Department and the DA and walks right in through the judge’s chambers—and which uses the status offenses long ago discarded and ignored by a system intently focused on young, hardened crimin
als.

  As he expected, soon after Judge Dorn began his new program, there were complaints that he was squandering precious court time and probation resources on kids who hadn’t even committed a crime, while serious offenders were waiting their turn, their cases delayed. The criticisms escalated when Dorn, who has made it clear that placating him will always be easier than opposing him, persuaded the Probation Department to dedicate one officer to do nothing but handle his status offense cases. It was assumed that this PO would have little to do and could soon return to regular duties, but, to everyone’s surprise but Dorn’s, parents began showing up regularly at Dorn’s door, their children in tow. Just through word of mouth at schools and churches, forty to fifty children a month were soon coming to Dorn, then trooping to his special PO for status offense investigations. The demand for such a service—and its potential for success—were far higher than anyone had realized. The interest in the community in Dorn’s program has been so startling (and its success so great, though Dorn’s claim of a 95 percent success rate has yet to be proven) that a task force on juvenile justice issues brought together by Dorn decided to recommend the judge’s status offender program be duplicated in every juvenile courthouse in LA.

  It might have happened, too. But the county government’s sudden budget crisis derailed the proposal for now, perhaps permanently. For the foreseeable future, only Dorn and his two colleagues on the bench in the Inglewood courthouse will aggressively pursue status offenders.

  Though Dorn has won over converts, others in the courthouse remain fearful, even outraged, by Dorn’s private sessions in chambers. They see Dorn as playing fast and loose with the rules, aiming for his own personal vision of what’s right, rather than what’s legal. While Dorn is dealing with another status offender case in chambers, a defense lawyer waiting in court gripes, “Here he is, in there with a kid, making threats, making orders he has no legal right to make, there’s no court reporter in there, the kid has no lawyer—it’s a kangaroo court. There are no checks and balances. Dorn’s doing exactly what a judge did to Gault thirty years ago.”

  As much as Dorn would like to dismiss such criticisms as coming from recalcitrant bureaucrats and defense lawyers eager to protect a gravy train of court appointments, it is true that the status offense process Dorn is using lacks some of the checks and balances that other delinquency and criminal cases carry. Locking up status offenders is illegal, but Dorn finds ways to do it anyway, relying primarily on a judge’s power to hold anyone who disobeys a judicial order in contempt of court. The problem with this, however, is the law still requires—for obvious reasons—that runaways, incorrigibles, and other status offenders be housed completely apart from delinquents who commit actual crimes. And there is no room for them all—there are only forty secure status offender beds in all of Los Angeles County, with Judge Dorn and the other two Inglewood judges quickly filling them all, leaving nothing left for the other twenty-five juvenile judges and commissioners who occasionally need to hold a child in that way.

  “Judge Dorn does not live in the 1990s, he lives in the 1940s,” the director of one of LA’s juvenile halls griped. “He says, ‘Lock ’em up,’ and we have to obey his orders, but the thing is, the extra time and money we spend on his kids, we have to take away from other kids elsewhere. He’s not operating in a vacuum.”

  Status offenders also fall under a different portion of the welfare code than other delinquents, one the District Attorney does not enforce. Instead, a probation officer—who does not have the same independence from judicial control that a DA enjoys—fills that role, acting as prosecutor of status offenders. And though a child is still entitled to a defense attorney, that lawyer does not enter the process until after Dorn has had his informal hearing without lawyers, and has, in essence, already made up his mind about a kid. It is Dorn, after all, who often suggests to parents that they file the necessary papers to initiate a status offense case.

  The case of a sixteen-year-old problem child named Rolando exacerbated these fears, hardening opposition to Dorn’s program, particularly among public defenders.

  Rolando’s grandmother brought the boy to Dorn. She had heard about the judge in Inglewood who ran an open court and who would help families with children out of control. Rolando’s grandmother had raised the boy since age three, when the dependency branch of Juvenile Court took him from his mother because of chronic neglect. Like so many other foster children, Rolando started getting in trouble as an adolescent. At age fifteen, he joined a gang in the small city of Lennox on the edge of Los Angeles International Airport (a gang that is, coincidentally, the chief rival to Carla James’s Tepa-13 gang).

  Within a few months, he had racked up four arrests for vandalism and graffiti. He was released without formal prosecution each time. More recently, he had become a constant truant, and had stolen money and jewelry from his grandparents to finance a new drug habit—more than four thousand dollars’ worth, his grandmother estimated. He sold the jewelry on the streets, using his earnings to buy rock cocaine and a particularly dangerous drug popular with juveniles, Sherm—marijuana laced with angel dust, an animal tranquilizer that causes hallucinations and, at times, wild, violent behavior.

  Desperate for help and disgusted with the juvenile system’s past performance, Rolando’s grandmother and grandfather dragged the boy to Dorn and told him Rolando had stolen thousands of dollars from them in the past few months. Dorn questioned the boy, demanding he tell the truth, and Rolando confessed to stealing the jewelry and cash. Dorn then ordered him taken into custody by his bailiff so that the grandparents could go to the police department and file a theft complaint. Then the boy was turned over to the police so a formal theft case could be prosecuted by the DA.

  Both prosecutors and the public defenders were incredulous at Dorn’s actions in the case. No one actually had the nerve to confront the judge with this criticism, but privately they claimed Dorn had no legal right to detain Rolando before charges were filed. The judge had no jurisdiction. They also questioned the seemliness of a judge interrogating a boy accused of crimes, rather than backing off as soon as the grandmother made it clear she was talking about grand theft rather than a status offense. By urging (by some accounts, ordering) the grandparents to file a theft complaint with the police, they said, Dorn had become an advocate, sacrificing his judicial objectivity. And beyond that, because the boy confessed after talking to Dorn, the judge had become a potential witness in the case. He also had left himself open to charges that he used his judicial authority to coerce a confession from the boy, which, if true, would be a violation of Rolando’s constitutional rights.

  “It’s a mess,” Peggy Beckstrand sighed once the police brought the case in for prosecution. “And now we’re stuck with it.” Yet even she admitted that Judge Dorn had managed to do something for a child and a family that the system had previously been unable to help. Constitutional questions aside, no one really doubted Rolando’s guilt. And for the first time, the kid faced real consequences for his actions. For the first time, he and his family had a chance.

  “Dorn’s goals are laudable,” Peggy told her staff during one in a continuing series of discussions on how to deal with the supervising judge. “There’s no doubt about that. What he wants to do is wonderful. The problem is how he does it. He doesn’t want to play by the rules. He doesn’t really want to be a judge. He wants to be king. And this is going to come up again and again. Wait and see.”

  Peggy’s words were prophetic, and she didn’t have to wait long in order to see them come true.

  · · ·

  “They’re inside me,” Keesha Jordan began complaining at age twelve, at first infrequently, then more often as the years passed. “The voices.”

  And they were angry voices, difficult to ignore, chiding her, tormenting her, telling her—with increasing frequency—to do terrible things, unspeakable things. They made her curse her older sister Tina, vile words she didn’t even remember learning, tumbling out of
her in an unstoppable stream. She felt like a soda bottle shaken by invisible, malevolent hands at such times, frothing, overflowing, out of control. It got so Tina couldn’t bring friends to the house—Keesha scared them too much.

  Still, she got all A’s and B’s at school, she never cut class, she didn’t hang out with bad kids, didn’t do drugs. Keesha never even had a boyfriend, much less experimented with sex. In many ways, she had been a model child. Sure, she stayed locked up in her bedroom most of the time and occasionally had confused, sometimes violent yelling matches when no one else was present. But things could be a lot worse for a kid these days, her mother figured, what with gangs and guns and pregnant teenagers everywhere. Besides, there were more pressing concerns for the Jordan family. Forty years old and on her own, Mrs. Jordan was too busy with Keesha’s little sisters, ages two and three, and with getting rid of an abusive ex-husband who had beaten her, Keesha, and the other kids for years. At the same time, Mrs. Jordan was fighting to stay off the drugs that had hooked her in the past. Who had time to take Keesha to some shrink for counseling? And who could afford it if there was time? Keesha’s mother worked hard as a stock clerk to support the whole family, barely making ends meet with the $750 monthly salary she pulled in, most of which went to pay the rent. She was gone many days and evenings, and twenty-year-old Tina had to keep things together. It was easy for Mrs. Jordan to keep saying to herself, Keesha will outgrow this phase, she’ll be fine, she has a bright future. Sometimes, she even believed it.

  The kids who land in Juvenile Court share certain common characteristics: Most of their crimes are preceded by years of unheeded warning signs, and most of their parents possess high capacities for self-absorption or self-delusion. Keesha was no exception. It took the events of the evening of November 15, 1993, to shock her mother into realizing—too late—that Keesha was not going to simply outgrow her problems. But by then, the juvenile justice system had taken over.