Sometimes I Think About It

by Stephen Elliott

  “Remember when you got fired?” he asks.

  “I had stolen a snowboard from Vail Resorts.”

  “Yeah.”

  We try to laugh, but it’s hard.

  —Tel Aviv, 2006

  California Superpredator

  1

  Sometimes he hears voices. Often, they are just whispers. On December 2, 1999, it’s the voice of David Foster. David is thirty-five and one of the most feared people in the neighborhood. Alonza is walking home from school, wearing a light-blue shirt. “Hey,” David says. “Come here.”

  Alonza runs, but the man catches him, sliding his heavy arms below Alonza’s thin arms, locking the boy into a full nelson. “Why you wearing blue?” David says. “You a Crip?” David’s gang pours from the alley, surrounding the child. Some of the gangsters are children too, younger than Alonza. Three are girls. They kick Alonza’s legs, hit him with elbows, smack him in the head with a forty-ounce beer bottle. Alonza falls to the ground. A foot stamps his face; the voices are screams. He digs at the cement, the rocks catching under his fingernails, lost in the bodies chanting “Bloods, Bloods, Bloods.”1

  Fifteen-year-old Alonza Rydell Thomas lives in Bakersfield, in the sprawling desert of the Central Valley. The city is expanding. It’s now the thirteenth largest in California, with 221,000 people. They’re putting up pitch roofs faster than stoplights. People keep arriving from Los Angeles, snatching up the cheap houses. There are parks on the map, but the parks aren’t built yet. There are parts of Bakersfield with every chain restaurant you can imagine but no post office and no library. Drive half an hour just to send your mail. And there’s a ghetto not far from downtown, in the eye of the sprawl, filled with low, dark bungalows, marked by their lack of air-conditioning. It’s like living in an oven.

  He’s six foot three, thin as straw. He has a child’s shoulders, a child’s smile. He’s knobby and loose. There’d be something almost handsome about him if he weren’t so awkward; there’s something wrong with his head. He’s not a bad kid; he doesn’t get in trouble. He’s not in a gang. His record is as clean as an upscale restaurant. His mother is a schoolteacher. Her name is Janice, but everybody calls her by her last name, Venus. His daddy lives in San Diego. He stayed with his father for a year when he was twelve, but his father got rough and Janice had to call the police, bring him back home. He has two brothers, normal as can be.

  Janice and Alonza see David Foster stopped by the police. Janice tells the police that he is the man who beat up her son. Alonza appears in court to testify against David Foster. Foster is sentenced to thirteen years for a series of offenses and parole violations.

  February 2000, desert winter. A note comes from school—Alonza has been failing his classes. In response his mother takes his money, four dollars. Alonza thinks his mother doesn’t love him anymore. He’s never had a keen understanding of consequences.

  He sits near the tracks east of Truxtun Avenue, just down from Kern County Superior Court. The slow-moving train passes overhead, while the underpass tunnels beneath the rails. Alonza swings just for a second, long fingers gripping the steel-gray container, hauling himself into the empty car, traveling north toward Sacramento. He has become a statistic, one of two million American children who run away every year.

  Two weeks later Alonza returns. He stands at the door of his own home, but the door is locked. It’s late at night, and he thinks his mother has locked him out. She says later she just didn’t hear him. He disappears into the city.

  Alonza meets a man known as Baby Boy. Now they are partners. The man gives him food, beats him, molests him. Tells Alonza if he wants to go home, he’ll have to rob a store. At least, that’s what Alonza says later, after he’s been sitting in a jail cell for a couple of weeks. No way to know if it’s true. But there is some evidence to support it.

  March 21, 2000, 6:20 p.m., the Fastrip convenience store on Mt. Vernon, right out there where those new houses are being built and the streetlights don’t work. A quiet neighborhood; never any crime. The store sells gasoline, alcohol, and snacks. Alonza Thomas ties a scarf behind the back of his neck as the sun falls behind the mountains, leaving a hazy twilight for the moon. The gun is a .22, the second most stolen gun after the .38 and the third most popular for criminals, accounting for 16 percent of all crimes involving guns.2 Alonza could close his fist around the gun and it would disappear.

  He enters through the side door, wearing latex gloves, holding the firearm sideways. He waves the gun at the three men behind the counter.

  For a moment the three men think it is some kind of joke, the scarf and the latex gloves and the way he holds the gun.

  “Give me the money,” Alonza says. He doesn’t look behind him. He doesn’t seem afraid. He walks straight to the counter and presses the gun against Nassri’s chest, and the men no longer think it is a joke.

  “You want the money?” Nassri Jaber states calmly. Nassri is the owner of the Fastrip. He isn’t supposed to be in tonight. “If you want the money, I’ll give you the money.” He opens the register, takes the bills out, hundreds of singles, also fives, tens, twenties. Maybe $300. But he misses a twenty, and Alonza sees it.

  “Money, money!” Alonza says, getting irritated. The men are becoming frightened. “I thought he was going to kill me,” Nassri says later in his deposition. The owner opens the register and gives Alonza the last twenty. There are no customers. It’s time for Alonza to leave, but he doesn’t. There is something wrong with him. His eyes are like glass.

  Alonza slides the gun from Nassri’s shoulder. “Open the safe,” he says. The safe is on the floor beneath the register. Nassri bends toward the countertop. Alonza isn’t paying attention. Ali Salah, the clerk, grabs Alonza’s wrist and yanks him forward. “He made me do it!” Alonza cries, a stack of jerkies tumbling to the floor.

  Othimi, the other clerk, hops the counter. The gun goes off. A pop like a paper bag, followed by smoke. Nassri grasps the phone. “My employee has been shot,” he says to the police. But he’s wrong. The gun discharged, but no one was hurt. The bullet has lodged in the Formica, where it will stay.

  Othimi hits Alonza in the head. The men struggle through the store, bottles and snacks falling from the shelves. It takes several minutes to subdue the boy. He seems stronger than his size. He bucks. His gun sits on the tile. The two clerks pin the delinquent. Nassri places his own gun, a .40 Glock, against Alonza’s temple, warns him to stop moving. Eight squad cars, a helicopter, and an ambulance are on their way. Nassri’s so angry, he wants to shoot. Alonza’s scarf is yanked from his face. Nassri thinks to himself, He’s just a child.

  2

  What Alonza Thomas doesn’t know is that two weeks before he walked into the Fastrip food mart holding a revolver sideways and demanding money, 62 percent of California voters approved the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act, also known as the Pete Wilson Initiative, or Proposition 21.

  It’s not an easy bill to understand. The initiative runs forty-five pages, contains twenty-four new priors, and amends dozens of existing provisions, rewriting the California criminal code. Lawyers claim it takes three full days to go through, and a law degree. Proposition 21 revises specific crimes for both adults and juveniles, changes available probation options, reduces confidentiality protections for juvenile suspects, reduces the threshold for felony vandalism to $400 from $20,000, and adds significant penalties for gang-related crimes for adults and juveniles—including the death penalty for gang-related murder.

  Most significantly, Proposition 21 changes the process of trying children as adults. The most serious juvenile felons, the rapists and murderers, were almost always already tried as adults before the passage of Proposition 21.3 Less serious but still violent crimes, like the armed robbery committed by Alonza, could be tried in adult court with a judge’s approval prior to Proposition 21 but usually weren’t.4 Those cases can now be filed directly in adult court at the whim of a prosecutor. This process, known as discretionary direct f
iling, is a favorite of the California District Attorneys Association, a group closely tied to the bill. But voters don’t know about discretionary direct filing. They think they’re voting against gang violence. They think they’re voting to allow children to be tried as adults. They don’t know that children can already be tried as adults. They don’t know that what they are really voting for is the removal of judicial oversight. The bill won’t save money. The removal of oversight is assumed to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Politicians have rarely lost elections for being too tough on crime. This is particularly true following the upsurge in youth crime between 1987 and 1993. In 1995, John Dilulio, a professor at Princeton, coined the term “juvenile superpredator.” The juvenile superpredators, according to Dilulio, are “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteen-age boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs and create serious communal disorders.” 5 Dilulio predicts that the number of American superpredators will swell in coming years if immediate action is not taken. “What we need,” he says, “are more churches and more jails.”

  The superpredator burns through criminology like a lit butt in a bale of cotton. Academics like James Q. Wilson begin warning of a modern plague of youth crime. “Thirty thousand more young muggers, killers, and thieves …,” states Wilson. “Get ready.” But the plague never arrives. In 1994, juvenile crime begins to drop. In 1997, crime has leveled off to pre-1987 statistics. In 1999, Wilson concedes, “So far [the rise in youth crime] clearly hasn’t happened. This is a good indication of what little all of us know about criminology.”

  Nonetheless, former governor Pete Wilson, in a short editorial supporting Proposition 21, quotes James Q. Wilson,6 predicting that in coming years, “California murders are most likely to be committed by a seventeen-year-old. This is a tragedy for the victims and their loved ones, but also for those youthful perpetrators who, despite preventive measures and intervention by state and local public agencies, are so hardened and remorseless that they cannot be turned from violence. It is they from whom society must be protected.”7

  It costs a lot of money to get a complicated initiative on the ballot. A Nevada casino and a Texas auto insurance company each give $10,000 to the signature-gathering campaign. Chevron donates $25,000, Pacific Gas and Electric gives $50,000. Another $50,000 comes from Unocal. Unocal’s spokesman says, “We have a strong interest in youth.” Chevron spokesman Mike Marcy says his company contributed “at then-Governor Wilson’s request.”8

  The campaign to get the initiative on the ballot raises three-quarters of a million dollars. But when Wilson leaves office and his presidential campaign founders, the corporate donors disappear. The measure sits on the docket like a weed.

  Proposition 21 takes effect on March 8, 2000. Alonza Thomas is the first child in Kern County tried as an adult under the new rules for discretionary direct filing. The juvenile superpredator has come to life, the unredeemable child. In March 2001, Alonza is sentenced to thirteen years in adult prison for armed robbery.9

  3

  There are flowers in the garden and well-manicured lawns at the Tehachapi state prison, a level IV adult correctional facility in the Kern County Valley. Upon arrival, in September 2001, following six months in the California Youth Authority, Alonza is placed in a small isolation cell, usually reserved for punishing problem inmates. He’s given a series of medical, psychological, and educational tests. He is fed in his cell, released only a few hours a week for showers and exercise. While children are being processed, they don’t go to school. Processing usually takes two to three months but sometimes more.10

  Alonza and the others are confined to maximum security in the new Youthful Offender Program, in a separate, beige wing with barbed-wire fences, where they are prepared for the mainline. There are two small concrete outdoor exercise areas originally designed for adult administrative segregation inmates. The children do not have access to the counseling and rehabilitative programs available to juveniles committed in the California Youth Authority. They spend their time in small groups in a windowless dayroom the size of a king-size bed. They sleep two to a room, have access to television and radio unless they are under administrative segregation. School is canceled because of fog, because of lack of space, because only five of the eight teacher positions are filled. Rules are strict and enforced. A third of the juvenile inmates in the adult prison are in administrative segregation at any time. Children in administrative segregation do not go to school.11

  Alonza is transferred for short-term psychiatric treatment six times, where he is placed on medication, stabilized, then returned.

  Janice parks in the dirt lot set in back of the Tehachapi campus. She is with her two other children, twelve-year-old Phillip and seventeen-year-old Patrick. They wait in the entry for their names to be called. They are searched, their hair is checked, gone over with a wand, processed through a metal detector. Their hands are stamped. They wait for a bus. Thirty people board the bus and drive two minutes to another check-in facility, where they are searched again. They walk through a glass corridor, through an outdoor pathway, and into a building, where they take a staircase down. Here is the visitors’ area, sectioned off to the left for visiting juveniles. Janice and her sons sit at a table as high as their knees. Games are available, checkers, backgammon. When Alonza arrives, his face is swollen like a ripe plum, eyes yellow with purple lids, cheeks red and bruised.

  “Who did this to you?” she asks. His eyes are so large, he can barely open them. He sounds like he’s speaking through a sponge.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” he says. “It’s taken care of.” Janice doesn’t believe him. She calls the prison to complain.

  In 2003, scandal rocks the juvenile unit at Tehachapi. Many of the children are mentally disturbed. The weeks and months in isolation cells exacerbate their condition. Alonza attempts suicide while in Tehachapi. In March, a delegation of clergy visits and finds a boy kept in a solitary cell in the infirmary, where seriously deranged adult inmates scream at him and expose themselves on the other side of the door’s small window. Children tried as adults in Los Angeles County are held during trial at the Men’s Central Jail, kept in isolation 23.5 hours a day. In May, two juveniles at Men’s Central attempt to commit suicide. In July, Francis Ray, a seventeen-year-old youth offender serving a three-year sentence for second-degree robbery, hangs himself after four months in an isolation cell at Tehachapi. State Senator Gloria Romero orders an investigation.

  When Janice calls Tehachapi to check on her son in August 2003, an officer tells her, “He won’t be coming back here.”12

  One of the arguments made in favor of placing juveniles in adult facilities is that they are a drain on resources better used on children for whom rehabilitation is considered a possibility. The report from the inspector general strongly recommends a reversal of this policy. Tehachapi’s special juvenile unit is closed in July 2004.

  4

  It’s 110 degrees at ten in the morning in the Antelope Valley, the sky a deep, empty blue. A short, muscular prisoner named Vince Crittendon approaches the fence wearing a sleeveless top and blue jeans and fingerless gloves for weight lifting.13 He’s been in prison for twenty years on a thirty-to-life sentence for robbery and murder. He calls to a man in a shiny brown shirt and muted tie.

  The man Vince calls to is Ken Lewis, assistant to the warden. Vince wants to talk about his son. He hasn’t seen him since the boy was five. He tells Ken his son is next door, on the C unit, serving seven years for something involving “drugs or guns.” He wants to see the child. Ken explains it probably won’t be possible. Vince’s son is in a special-needs section and is not allowed to mix with prisoners from other units.

  “OK,” Vince says, nodding. “I just thought I could get through to him. Help him understand.”

  They’re in the honor yard, a special unit reserved for well-disciplined prisoners serving life with little
chance of parole. To be in the honor yard, a prisoner must spend five years incarcerated without incident, have no active gang affiliation, express willingness to program with inmates of any race, and be drug-free.

  The honor yard is the highlight of California State Prison–Los Angeles County, in Lancaster. It’s the only honor yard in the state. There is a sense of order and resigned calm. Men sit outside playing cards or exercising or in the art studio, watching a painting video. Other inmates repair glasses donated by the Lions Clubs that are then sent to those in need all over the world. In other yards prisoners are separated by gang affiliation, history, security level. In the honor yard the inmates mix freely.

  On the same unit as the honor yard are buildings A4 and A5, administrative segregation, where Alonza Thomas is being held in solitary confinement five years after his botched attempt to rob the Fastrip food mart. Ten hours a week, Alonza is taken to a small, enclosed yard. The yard can’t be seen. There is no dayroom, no interaction. Administrative segregation inmates wear all white. When Alonza leaves the unit, he shuffles in ankle chains, hands cuffed behind his back, a guard on either arm.

  Alonza has no radio, no TV. Nothing electric. Alonza has been placed in solitary for his own protection. He snitched on his cell mate, just as years before he snitched on David Foster.14

  His mother thinks he belongs in a mental hospital. The psychiatrists keep him on medication. Since entering the California correctional system, Alonza has been transferred eighteen times, at least seven times for psychological treatment. Sometimes the voices go away. Today the voice he hears is the voice of Samuel Brown, his former cell mate, whose segregated cell is just down the hall. The voice says Alonza is going to be killed.

  Nobody gets in to visit administrative segregation. “You would need permission from Sacramento,” Ken Lewis says. “And I can tell you right now, they’re not going to give it to you.” Ken explains the layout of the unit, a design known as a 270, a square with a triangle cut from the center. There are one hundred cells, fifty on top and fifty below, blue doors and small windows. Time like an ocean.