by Edward Humes
PART FOUR
Epilogue
“I think by age fifteen there is a small number of kids who, for whatever deprivations they have suffered, are cooked, as my grandmother would have said. They are gone. Whatever you do is not going to make a difference. . . . I think the solution is to pare down the money we spend on those kids . . . [and] invest in the vast majority of kids who come from the same environment and are right on the cusp. . . . People will say, You are stigmatizing the bad kids. Well, if you have 36 kids in a classroom and four are throwing chairs at the teacher, you have to excise them. Otherwise, all will be lost. This is war.”
JUDGE JUDITH SHEINDLIN, supervising judge, Manhattan Family Court, in the New York Times, December 30, 1994
Every 5 seconds of the school day, a student drops out.
Every 10 seconds a teenager becomes sexually active.
Every 26 seconds a baby is born to an unmarried mother.
Every 30 seconds a baby is born into poverty.
Every 59 seconds a baby is born to a teen mother.
Every 2 minutes a baby is born without prenatal care.
Every 4 minutes a child is arrested for a violent crime.
Every 7 minutes a child is arrested for a drug crime.
Every 2 hours a child is murdered.
Every 4 hours a child commits suicide.
CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND, “A Child’s Day”
12-13-94
Dear Sister Janet,
I hope when you receive this letter that it finds you in the best of health and in God’s loving care. So how are you doing today? How is Ruth doing too? I hope you two are still touching hearts and putting smiles on the new minors’ faces, just like you did to me when I was doing my time there. So how is Ed, is he still doing his writing classes there too?
Well, I’m doing fine up here in prison, very different from the other places I’ve been to since I’ve been locked up. But right now here in Wasco we are always on lock-down, it is very messed up here. There’s really no program except for the one T.V. that’s in the day room that we have to watch from our cells. But at least I won’t be here long, I should leave any week . . . I saw my counselor already and he gave me my first eligible parole date, it is September the First, 2002. No later, no sooner.
I’m the youngest one here in Wasco. I’m only eighteen years old. Some of the guards here tell me: “Hey Kid, why don’t you go back to CYA or Juvenile Hall, you’re only eighteen.” I guess they think it’s funny, but when they checked my background and found out I got busted when I was sixteen years old and done about two years in Central Juvenile Hall and got kicked out of CYA, then they stopped making smart remarks to me.
Well in this letter I’m sending you a poem about my loved ones that have passed away. Show it to Ed and the rest. If you want to, go ahead and make yourselves some copies. I love and miss you all, from Blinky Clanton.1
Love Always,
Elias Elizondo
It’s Not All In My Mind
My outside may make you think that my heart is made of stone . . .
Is it my baggy pants, my tattoos and the sharp look that I own?
I look just like every Clanton cholo around,
standing on the neighborhood’s corner tall and thin . . .
If I were to show you my true feelings,
this is where I would begin.
Abandoned by a father, raised by my mother . . .
Tios, Tias, primos, primas,2
Familia always lying to each other.
Not much love would come from me . . .
Because if you take a good look, I’m hurting pretty badly.
I have stared down at my Abuelo3 Alex’s grave . . .
The flowers I’ve picked for him, I’ve saved.
Now I’ve buried my fourteen-year-old homeboy Payaso . . .
who took his last breath in my arms because of a cuetaso.4
My heart has screamed nothing but pain and agony . . .
Why did God take away my newborn primo, Baby Stevie?
One second I’m strolling with my homie Looney down the street . . .
The next second I hear bang, bang, bang only to find myself kneeling by him,
without his heartbeat.
I’ve missed three funerals since my incarceration, both of my abuelitas5 and one childhood friend . . .
Natural causes will always be here, but all this murder must end!!
We all know that our loved ones will come and go . . .
Oh Lord Jesus, please don’t take any more until I parole.
Elias Elizondo, Wasco State Prison, December 13, 1994
15 Years to Life, Torcido:6 1992-93-94-??
CHAPTER 18
A Year Later, Another Day in Court
JUDGE Roosevelt Dorn’s bench is, as usual, piled high with files this morning, another crammed docket, another typical day in a Los Angeles Juvenile Court that has lost ground in the year since Dorn took back his bench at Thurgood Marshall. With the fervor of a minister, he regularly pronounces the Juvenile Court he loves under siege and on the verge of extinction, exhorting the disaffected professionals who work there to give more of themselves, to make a difference, to resist the unraveling of this place. He continually pleads with lawmakers to lift the shroud of confidentiality from his court, so the public can see beyond the well-publicized failures of the system and glimpse how juvenile justice can work—and why it is in need of rebuilding, not demolition.
His pleas, so far, have been in vain, and so he does what he can, jamming more and more files onto his docket and those of the other two Inglewood courtrooms, an almost frenzied effort to help as many kids as he can, as fast as he can. As long as he can.
The files themselves, piled so high on his bench and his clerk’s desk, make for an interesting and revealing study—not their contents, but their actual physical size, shape, and weight. As telling a trend as any visible in Juvenile Court can be discerned from such simple observation. Some of the dog-eared manila folders are barely the width of an Oreo creme filling. Others are so thick that if tossed onto a desktop, they would land with the same heavy, hollow thud of a Sunday paper hitting a concrete porch. The thickness of a file is crucial, the single most revealing thing about any Juvenile Court case because, unlike adult court, where each new crime generates a new file, juveniles get one folder for life, with each new offense piled in with the others. It’s as if you kept the same report card from your first day of kindergarten through your last day of high school—your entire institutional life, all in one place.
One quick look at a file, even a brief heft without benefit of a glance inside, speaks volumes to an experienced judge or prosecutor or defender. Dorn can tell down to the fraction of an inch what the probable ending to a case will be, without ever having to read the contents. When a file is a sixteenth of an inch, it will almost certainly end in probation. A quarter to a half inch, add some time in the hall, maybe move the kid to a group home after release. An inch or so in thickness, and the likely sentence is one of the county’s two dozen juvenile camps. And over two inches, the kid is probably a Sixteen Percenter, allowed too many bites of the apple, and now headed to the Youth Authority.
In the past year, the files have gotten thicker. More kids have been allowed to commit more offenses, and the time lag between arrest and a first appearance in court has blossomed, sometimes as long as eight or nine months, an effect so far removed from the cause that, to kids, the Juvenile Court appears to have no power at all. At the same time, the options available for dealing with juvenile offenders when they finally do appear in court have shriveled, thanks to harsh new laws and even harsher budget cuts.
Judge Dorn calls his calendar, the voice just as booming and rich as ever, gentle persuader soaked in molasses one moment, strident and intimidating the next, his biting words shaking insolence from young criminals—and torpor from disinterested attorneys—as if he were shaking dust from a rug. He hefts a thick file, then glances over his gl
asses at the defense table. A sixteen-year-old charged with burglary and auto theft—committed while he was on probation for cocaine sales and assault with a deadly weapon—has been escorted in for disposition. The judge looks the boy over, rifles the file one more time, then makes a snap decision to disregard a Probation Department recommendation that he go to the California Youth Authority prison system. Dorn chooses a far milder sentence of long-term probation camp instead—despite the boy’s failure to be reformed by two previous camp sentences from other judges. It is a common Dorn tactic, one that irks prosecutors without necessarily endearing him to defenders—kids get one across-the-board break the first time he sees them because, as he so often notes, being on probation to Judge Dorn is a whole new experience.
“You’ve received your break. Everyone gets one break in Judge Dorn’s courtroom,” he tells the boy, glancing at a report that shows the kid has led a double life as an inner-city gang member nicknamed “Lefty,” while staying in school and earning good grades. “Now it’s up to you. . . . You’ve been exceptionally lucky—lucky you haven’t been killed with the kind of life you’ve been living. How many of your friends have you seen get killed?”
“A lot,” Lefty answers truthfully. The two simple words, announced without sorrow or pity, say much about Lefty: He has witnessed so many kids in his neighborhood killed in drive-bys and jackings that he has come to see violent, premature ends as the natural way of things. Dorn knows this, and sees in it a reason for mercy, a child he might save. Others see only a hardened, calloused indifference to life, something to fear and lock away. Today, in this courtroom at least, it is Judge Dorn’s vision that will prevail.
“A lot,” Dorn repeats quietly. “Do you want to die in the streets?”
The kid has to think about it a second—not that he wants to die, but that it never occurred to him that he might have a choice in the matter. Hesitantly, Lefty says, “No.”
“Then things have got to change.”
The boy nods and agrees—though whether Dorn has planted a seed of hope in this kid, or if Lefty is merely telling the judge what he wants to hear, will not be known for months or years, if ever. Either he will leave camp and never appear in Juvenile Court again, or he will commit yet another crime, with only prison ahead of him, all other options exhausted. In the first scenario, sending him to camp will prove to be the best thing that ever happened to Lefty. But if he commits another, worse crime, he may find himself headed not to CYA, but to adult court and adult prison, in which case Dorn’s decision will become Lefty’s—and his next victim’s—worst nightmare, mercy converted to curse. It is a gamble. Juvenile Court is always a gamble. Dorn is betting Lefty can be saved. He’d rather lose that wager, he says, than bet the other way, and never know if he could have turned the kid around. “That’s what Juvenile Court is all about,” he says. “These are our children. They deserve every chance we can give them.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not because he wants to be nice, or even because it’s the best thing for this kid,” whispers a deputy public defender sitting in the courtroom. “Dorn just likes to keep them all under his thumb. He can’t do that with a kid in CYA, but he can with camp.” This aside is intended as a criticism, but the truth is, Dorn heartily agrees with this assessment. Later on, he even laughs about it. “Better my thumb than prison, I daresay.”
As usual, there is no time to agonize over any of this while court is in session. With a shuffle of papers and a scurrying of lawyers, before Lefty and the bailiff even make it through the back door to the holding tank, the roll call resumes. A fifteen-year-old girl with a teardrop tattooed in the corner of her left eye hears her name called out, stands, and says, “Here.” She is at least six months pregnant, a huge, low belly on a tiny frame. She is charged with theft. The unmarried mother who bore her at age sixteen sits nearby in very tight black acid-washed jeans and jacket, the faded blue ink of crude gang tattoos still visible on her fingers and wrist, those three dots that signify “my crazy life,” the gangster’s shorthand for I don’t care if I live or die, so why should I give a shit about you? This is the family he has to work with. Dorn sighs and rubs his eyes, and begins the process anew, looking for a way and a reason to save a lost child.
· · ·
The job has gotten harder. In the year since Judge Dorn returned from his adult court exile, the system of juvenile justice in Los Angeles, in California, and nationwide has been shaken far more than at any time since the first juvenile court opened for business in Chicago at the turn of the century.
Juvenile crime overall leveled off or declined slightly in 1994 compared with years past, but no one is celebrating any victories. Juvenile violence and serious crimes are still climbing, and they remain far higher than a decade ago. With the population of older teenagers in America growing—just now entering the “prime crime” years between sixteen and nineteen—most experts have predicted new record highs in youth crime before the turn of the century, and continuing for years to come—a 150 percent increase by 2010, by Justice Department estimates. Any current declines, it seems, are merely a lull before the storm. These trends are exacerbated in Los Angeles County, where there are 150,000 known members of 900 criminal street gangs; there were only 30,000 gang members in 1982. (By way of comparison, there are 640,000 kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District.) Projections for the year 2000 put LA area gang membership at 250,000. Based on current trends, 90 percent of these kids can be expected to have been arrested at least once as juveniles; 75 percent arrested twice. Sixty percent will be dead or in prison by age twenty.1
These experts—esteemed academics and advisors to presidents—couldn’t have been more wrong about the predicted growth in juvenile crime. It would never happen. Indeed, within a year, juvenile crime would, like crime in general, begin a decline that the experts refused to acknowledge for years, until the numbers became so stark that they could not be denied. Some of the nation’s most esteemed (or, at least, most quoted) criminologists were warning of an approaching “super predator” apocalypse. But instead of the predicted 150 percent increase in youth crime by 2010, juvenile offenses would show double-digit declines by that year. Murders committed by children would dip to a third of what they were in 1994. The coming wave of young predators would be shown to be a myth of tragic proportions. One of the myth’s chief purveyors, John J. DiIulio, Jr., a Princeton University star in the 1990s, would later recant his demographics-based predictions, explaining his hubris with a simple lesson: “Demography is not fate.”2
But fear is a powerful motivator, and it has not mattered that this new “evidence” goading us to fear our children would soon be proved to be myth. The outrage of the present, fueled by false fears of the future, propelled movements in a majority of states to adopt laws that limit or eliminate juvenile court jurisdiction over entire groups of children once guaranteed treatment in juvenile court. In Pennsylvania, for one, new laws now require kids fifteen and older who commit violent crimes to be automatically tried as adults. Georgia one-upped by doing the same for kids fourteen and older. No fitness hearings are required, no debate about whether or not a child can be saved or whether there are special circumstances at work. Just put them in with the adults, no questions asked, subject to all the same sentences as any adult, including death in Pennsylvania. This approach to juvenile justice mirrors new laws in Colorado, Arizona, Illinois, and other states, already in place or proposed for the near future.3 Many others have lowered the fitness age. These new laws are wildly popular with elected officials and many voters, but they also make the late Justice Potter Stewart’s dissent in the Gault decision thirty years ago all the more prescient. The inevitable outcome of making juvenile court a miniature version of adult court, he foresaw, is the end of treating children differently from adults. That single dirty phone call in 1964 is still slowly but surely putting the juvenile justice system out of business.
In California, the process of dismantling Juvenile Court is moving along at
an equally brisk pace: In 1994, legislators in Sacramento changed the fitness law to eliminate any future Ronald Duncan cases. Now, many violent criminals fourteen or older can be sent to adult court after a fitness hearing, lowering the cutoff from age sixteen, and making it possible to sentence fourteen-year-old adolescents to life in prison (though the death penalty for juveniles remains out of reach in California). This new law is largely a panacea for public fears about juvenile crime—only a tiny fraction of 1 percent of juvenile offenders will be affected by the lower age threshold—but it also marks a critical philosophical turning point. California was one of the last states in the Union to have clung to the sixteen-year threshold. By the beginning of 1995, only the state of Hawaii still treated all kids under sixteen as juveniles in all cases. Jubilant supporters of lowering the fitness age suggested the change in California would make future attempts to get tough on juvenile offenders far easier. Indeed, additional legislation soon followed that makes it harder to sentence kids back into the juvenile system once they have been transferred to adult court, a process that was never easy to begin with, but which is now almost impossible.
The change will be unlikely to satisfy any faction in the juvenile court debate. Such reforms still keep the debate—and the system—stubbornly fixated on chronological age as the single most important factor in deciding who should be treated as a kid and who should be viewed as a legal adult. This will always produce unfair results on both ends—there will always be the cold killer too young to try as an adult; there will always be the heartbreaker who deserves a break but can’t get one because of his birthday; there will always be the clever, older gangbanger who finds a young kid to manipulate into doing his dirty work for him—they’ll just be younger now than before.
Beyond new laws that shrink the Juvenile Court’s jurisdiction, the simple reality of diminishing budgets is devastating the system nationwide (and will continue to do so for decades). In Los Angeles, the Juvenile Court’s best hope for stemming the rising tide of youth violence and crime—programs that prevent rather than react—are dying. The enormous budget crisis in LA County has spiraled out of control, requiring a sixty-seven-million-dollar cut to the Probation Department alone. Very quietly—without even telling the juvenile court judges what it was doing—the Probation Department has moved to save money by cutting sentences to camp from eight months to as little as twelve weeks. But the kids know. They are all happily copping to camp sentences now whenever they can. If they had any reason to fear a sentence to camp before, which few did, they now laugh it off. Some kids in the hall have started calling camp sentences “pit stops.”