by Edward Humes
“If I see people I love, it will only make it harder for me to pass the time,” he says. “It will only remind me how much I wish I could be free, with them.”
He turns away then, looking out across the hall’s grounds, at the other kids playing softball and catching rays, the posturing and shoving and posing for the girls across the way. His narrow face tightens, the wistful sadness that had been there earlier vanishing, and it is easy to see how someone who didn’t know him could discern a hardness there, seeing callousness where there really is only emotional callus, layers built up over the years, a shield against more hurt.
“It’s easier to be alone,” he says quietly. “I’m used to it.”
CHAPTER 17
The Outs
In the same week George Trevino learns he has won a citywide essay contest while awaiting the start of his prison sentence, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno comes to Los Angeles, a person of power and position and a world so far removed from George’s that he has no conception of it or her. Yet, alone among national figures, she has made it her business to try to alter the way the country views and treats kids like George—and Geri and Carla and the other children of Juvenile Court.
“If we don’t wise up,” she says in her usual manner—half hammer-over-the-head bluntness, half passion, a dash of sarcasm—“we’ll never have enough money to build all the prison cells we’ll need.”
She is a tall, imposing block of a person, awkward and awe-inspiring at the same time. Having met with the mayor of Los Angeles, and preparing to don a cap and gown to address the graduating class at UCLA, Reno is sipping coffee at her hotel, her security detail guarding the door as she discusses one of her main interests as Attorney General—the juvenile justice system.
In the year and a half it took George’s case to wind its way to its sad conclusion, Reno has pointed out, in speech after speech, that half a person’s learned human responses are picked up in the first year of life, and that the whole concept of reward and punishment is learned—or not learned—by age three. What good is punishing kids later in life if they don’t connect it to their conduct, she asks, if the lack of nurturing, guiding adults in their early lives has left them totally deficient in matters of morality and conscience and empathy? We’ve got to reshape the system to begin the process of helping children steer clear of criminal behavior far earlier than is happening now, she says. And it has to happen everywhere—in day care centers, in hospital neonatal units, in classrooms and principals’ offices, with cops on the beat, with juvenile judges like Roosevelt Dorn, willing to counsel kids in chambers before they become criminals, with an army of volunteers willing to go into detention halls and camps and youth prisons to work one-on-one with troubled young people, to become that one, positive adult in their lives who gives them hope and approval, a sense that someone, somewhere, finds worth in them. It’s hard to take a chance on kids who have committed crimes, she says, but we have to suck up our guts and gamble on our children.
Not that the hard-liners are all wrong. Yes, Reno says, the true sociopathic children—she figures one in ten violent, serious juvenile offenders might qualify as bad seeds who cannot be rehabilitated—need to be locked up and dealt with harshly (though she says the current fitness system that simply fixates on chronological age and a laundry list of crimes does not accomplish this—there will always be the child-monster who beats the birthday cutoff by a year or a week). And all juvenile criminals, even minor ones, need to face definite, real, and rapid consequences, something the system is not doing well at present, she says. But in the nine out of ten cases that do not involve sociopaths, Reno envisions a whole spectrum of ways to help and heal children and families before they land in Juvenile Court, requiring a new way of thinking about the juvenile justice system, a cradle-to-grave approach. Waiting until some child commits his fifth offense is just not cutting it. It’s wrong, it’s stupid, and it shows our nation’s lack of commitment to its children, Reno says.
“Too often in the last thirty years America has forgotten and neglected its children. Twenty-one percent of the children in America live in poverty, a far greater percentage than any other age group. That’s our future, that’s our workforce in twenty years, those are our people who will be in prison in twenty years unless we do something about it.”
Before Janet Reno, juvenile justice—and children in general—have never really been a national priority. The real money has always been committed elsewhere, wars hot and cold, drug wars, space races, Social Security and medical coverage for the aged. There is the occasional blue-ribbon commission or congressional committee that produces some hand-wringing pronouncements about the dire problem of youth violence and crime, but the essential futility of the system’s predominant pattern—reacting to the worst juvenile offenders, instead of the first—goes on uninterrupted. Rare are the national figures who care to make children their signature issue. Janet Reno, for her efforts in this regard, has been attacked by conservatives in Congress, who deride her as more social worker than prosecutor. And though she sees some sparks of hope around the country—a handful of promising programs and a dawning realization that preventing juvenile crime beats imprisoning juvenile criminals any day—there is still a predominant tidal force in favor of reducing or killing the nation’s separate juvenile justice system, so that more kids can be treated as adults and locked away. Her calls for reform of a different kind have yet to yield any major changes.
“Locking everyone up is not the solution,” she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. “It’s just the symptom of the problem. It’s the proof that we’re doing something wrong.”
· · ·
A few days later, Juan Macias—Scrappy—bids the writing class farewell. He was convicted in adult court of assisting in the murder of honors student Alfred Clark, shot dead at McDonald’s over a CD player. Scrappy still insists he was unaware of his friend’s plans to kill Alfred, but few beyond Sister Janet believed him. “You got a gun, Scrappy?” his homeboy had asked. They had done petty crimes together before, been through probation and camp. He was a little crazy, but Scrappy still said Sure, and his friend said, “Can I have it?” Again, Sure. Then they went to eat, his friend had some words with the kid with the CD player, then told Scrappy, “Wait in the truck, homes, I’ll be right back.” The sound of gunfire had constricted Scrappy’s chest—he guessed immediately what his friend had done. Moments later, his red-faced friend had rounded the corner, bulleting toward the truck, elbows and knees pumping, wild expression on his face confirming Scrappy’s worst fears. “I did it,” his friend had exclaimed. “I wasted him.” Scrappy drove away fast, then hid the gun for his friend. Even as he jammed it into an old tool box and shoved it out of sight, he kept chanting to himself, Stupid, stupid, stupid. But what was he going to do? Turn his friend in? A week later, he was in the hall. Two years later, he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to twenty-six years to life in prison.
In writing class, Scrappy always crafted tender, amusing stories about a bashful boy named George who likes chubby girls because they are less likely to dump him. He wrote longingly of just lying in bed with such a girl, watching old movies on TV in a motel room, a nice, safe, clean room where no one would shoot at him. He spent two years in the hall, waiting for his case to come to trial, earning his high school diploma and becoming a model resident, volunteering as a mentor and tutor for young kids. Yet he also heard the DA talking about him in court, using words like “heinous” and “malicious” and “vicious.” He saw the hate in the eyes of Alfred Clark’s family. Could that be me they are talking about? he wondered.
Maybe, he later tells me, this is payback for all the bad things I’ve done before without getting caught. Haltingly, he describes how, years ago, he once watched a fellow gang member leave a party, drunk and furious, swearing he was going to go outside and kill a girl who had pissed him off. Scrappy did nothing to stop it, though he could have intervened with a w
ord. The next day, the girl was found beaten to death on the sidewalk. Fourteen years old, killed for nothing. Scrappy sits hunched over at the hall, remembering, saying the guilt over this has eaten at him for years (though it never would occur to him to turn his friend in to the police—in Scrappy’s universe, that would be dishonorable).
“Maybe God is punishing me for not doing nothing, you know?” he murmurs. “Maybe I’m paying for that by being here now for something I didn’t do. I figure whatever happens now, maybe I’ll deserve it, you know?”
Sitting in the hall’s Special Handling Unit, the last stop for kids sentenced to adult time, he is smiling and calm and surprisingly at ease, given the long incarceration stretching out before him like an empty highway through the desert. He says he will try to use every program and service he can squeeze out of the system—particularly during the first leg of his sentence, which will be at CYA—to try and better himself, and to earn the earliest release possible. “If I give up on myself, I might as well just be dead,” he says. “I don’t want to be dead.”
Then he gives me a copy of an essay he just wrote, one that tries to explain how he feels about how he came to be where he is. It is entitled “Regret.”
I stand looking out the window at the walls that separate me from the world. I see an old homeless man shuffling across the bridge. He walks with his head down as if he was going through some type of pain. A pain that won’t let go. Much the same as the pain that clings onto a mother when she’s not able to face she has lost a child.
The night merely lets me see that his hands are in his pockets. I wonder what he could be thinking. The word “regret” comes to mind. Is he now paying for a wrongdoing in his life? Does he regret? Or does the pain cause him to regret? Is he tired of experiencing the problems and the pain it causes? Does he hope to drift away—away to a place that would leave him at peace? I sense in him the loneliness I feel, even though he finds himself in the world that has its freedom.
As I see the old man walk away, I stand there trying to hold the tears that water my eyes. But the feeling is so strong teardrops come gushing down, like a father trying to fight the tears at his son’s funeral, but he eagers to weep.
I close my eyes, only to see a flashback of the time that caused me to go through this unwanted pain. I fall into a dream that burns my heart so slowly, as someone being tortured by a memory and aching at the visual memory of wrongdoing. I see the young man that departed from his mother and the wonderful dreams he wished to reach. The hopes and dreams the mother had for her child would never be reached. A mother never wishing to go through the pain of losing a child. The pain the mother goes through flashes off my body, like a light being turned on and off.
Experiencing the mother going through the awful pain causes me to force the words, “I regret” out. But is it easy just to say the words “I regret” and not feel any kind of physical, emotional, or mental pain? Has a person really regretted after saying the words? Do the words touch the deepest of a person’s heart to really mean them? Or has the person only said the words because the pain doesn’t seem to have an end to it? Does it only take one person to hurt another for the pain and loneliness to keep going in circles? Could the mother and lonely old man have done something in life to deserve to feel the pain and loneliness they feel?
As I open my eyes I sense life has its own way of teaching each person. If life is a learning experience, why lose a child, your freedom, and why feel hopeless to learn? Now I wonder: If people didn’t feel pain after a wrongdoing, would they regret?
IN Inglewood, another normal day is unfolding at the Thurgood Marshall Branch of Los Angeles Juvenile Court. Peggy Beckstrand is filing five weapons charges against five kids, all of whom were caught carrying pistols onto the campus of the same junior high school during the same week.
She also finds herself helpless against a kid known on the street as “Sniper,” a member of an extremely violent street gang called Asian Mob Assassins. Though he is suspected of running stolen automatic weapons and of committing at least one murder and one attempted murder, Peggy can’t prove anything but his illegal possession of two concealed semiautomatic pistols. In California, that remains a misdemeanor, even for juveniles, and the best she can do with Sniper is send him to camp for six months, assuming she can even convict him on the minor charge. Sniper thinks this is quite hilarious. “Why are they even bothering with this small-time crap?” he demands to know after his arraignment, casting an amused glance around the tired trappings of Thurgood Marshall. “Like I really care what goes on here.”
The public defenders, meanwhile, are up in arms again at Judge Dorn, this time for his practice of imposing one-day sentences to Juvenile Hall for every school day a probationer misses. For some insistently truant kids, this can add up to a month or more of detention by the time they are hauled into court—even though the public defenders believe the law limits such stretches of detention to a five-day maximum. They have begun papering Dorn again, but only on a very selective basis—minor cases where informal probation would be the sentence in most other courts, and Dorn’s beloved status offender cases, a tactic that genuinely grates on him.
At the same time, next door, Commissioner Polinsky has been asked to put a scare into a fifteen-year-old boy whose once high grades and active participation in varsity sports have dropped precipitously, replaced by cut classes and long hours spent in front of the television. He is a handsome, curly-haired kid in baggy chinos and big black Nikes, his expression bored as Polinsky forces him to watch a morning of court action. Just before lunch, the commissioner orders the boy into chambers for a dressing-down. Next stop, Polinsky warns, could be Judge Dorn’s status offender program if you don’t wise up. Then we’ll see how bored you look.
As the boy disappears into chambers, his father sits in the audience looking miserable, hoping this show of force (essentially toothless at this point) will help. “He tells me he knows the system can’t do anything to him for cutting school,” the father says. “I only hope this convinces him otherwise.” An hour later, he leaves with his son, who looks less than impressed. But Dad is due back at work—as a judge in another branch of the Juvenile Court.
Meanwhile, downstairs in Judge Scarlett’s courtroom, it is time for the final chapter in the Thirty-one Flavors murder case. Ronald Duncan is due in for his disposition, a hearing that should be as cut and dried as George Trevino’s—in its own way. But where the system was programmed to hammer George for a burglary no matter how deserving of leniency he might be, the system is just as arbitrarily programmed to be relatively lenient with Ronald Duncan for fatally shotgunning his two ice-cream store employers.
Scarlett looks blank when Duncan’s name is called by his clerk. Too much time and too many other cases have passed his bench in the three months since Ronald’s trial, and he doesn’t remember the case or the boy. He looks at Deputy DA Hyman Sisman, transferred to this more sedate courtroom from Dorn’s domain, and asks what the sentencing range is in the case. Peggy Beckstrand, sitting nearby, answers instead. “Twenty-five years to life times two, plus ten years for personal use of a firearm.”
Scarlett is startled for a moment, not expecting to hear from the deputy in charge, then says, “Oh, that’s right, you tried this case.” He clears his throat and says, “The court will call the Ronald Duncan matter.”
In the gallery, Ronald’s mother whispers, “Jesus,” and shuts her eyes. The bailiff brings out Ronald in his orange jumpsuit, grinning as always, waving to his relatives, who still cling stubbornly to their belief in the boy’s innocence—or at least something close to innocence.
In preparation for this hearing, Ronald talked to a probation officer about the offense and his background, there being no remaining legal reason to assert his right to remain silent. At his lawyer’s insistence, he also spoke to a court-appointed psychiatrist. Both PO and analyst generated similar, grimly negative reports about Ronald.
In both interviews, Ronald admitte
d that he lied in his court testimony, as well as in all his previous statements about the murders. He still insisted that he did not pull the trigger on the shotgun that obliterated the heads of Chuck and Adelina Rusitanonta, but now he has finally conceded that he was part of a plan to rob them at gunpoint. In his latest story, Ronald claims he and Jason Gueringer—the policeman’s godson who received immunity and became Peggy’s star witness—planned to stage the robbery at the ice-cream store. But Jason showed up late, Ronald told his interviewers. Frustrated, he and Jason followed the store owners’ car, then tried to rob them when the car halted at a stop sign. When they resisted, Jason shot them, according to Ronald’s new story. He said he and Jason were supposed to split the money later, but everything fell apart when the police were tipped off about Jason and his bloody van.
In telling this story, Ronald not only admitted being a perjurer—since he had denied planning the robbery during his trial testimony—but he also was admitting to murder, whether he knew it or not. Even disregarding all the evidence that puts the gun in Ronald’s hands and taking his newest story as literal truth, he is still guilty of murder for taking part in an armed robbery that resulted in two deaths. The felony murder rule makes him just as guilty; who pulled the trigger is irrelevant.
Ronald made no mention of being bullied, threatened, or coerced by the police into confessing. It was as if that had never happened.
When the probation officer asked Ronald if he thought there was anything wrong with planning an armed robbery against two people who had given him a job and had treated him with love and kindness, he said, “No. They were in business and they could always make more money.”