No Matter How Loud I Shout Read online

  Both of these newcomers ended up on the same unit, the lockup’s high-risk offender wing, joining the other murderers, rapists, and assorted other violent criminals awaiting trials or sentencing, stripped, searched, showered, and given orange jumpsuits to wear, their clothes and possessions boxed and tagged. After months, a year, possibly more, their cases will be resolved. The Intake Officer has no doubt which of the two murder defendants the system will end up treating more harshly.

  Geri Vance, the would-be motel robber—the murder defendant who killed no one—faces life in prison without possibility of parole, and will almost certainly get it.

  Ronald Duncan, the shotgun killer, can serve no more than eight years, and will probably do less. He can never see the inside of a state penitentiary. After his release, his record will be wiped clean, as if it never existed, the files sealed by state law, so that he can move freely, run for office, own a gun.

  Even a man made cynical from running the intake desk too many nights has to marvel at this. But the Intake Officer doesn’t dwell on such matters very long, nor does he try to manipulate some other result by injecting opinion into his reports. He gave up long ago trying to find sense in the workings of Juvenile Court.

  There is just too much else to deal with—things were backing up in the Old Wing. Let some overworked juvenile judge worry about the rights and wrongs of it all. The Intake Officer still had to deal with two young car thieves, a twelve-year-old child molester, an assortment of warring gangbangers, and a straight-A student who tried to hack her sister to death with a machete. There were papers to fill out and cells to fill up. It was a busy night behind the high stone walls of Los Angeles’s Central Juvenile Hall.

  Like always.

  Elias is reading to my class, his dark eyes fixed on the paper quivering in his hands.

  These are the things I learned when I was growing up:

  I learned how to take a spray can of paint

  and write my nombre on the wall.

  I learned how to make a Walkman’s motor into a tattoo machine,

  so that I could get my barrio on my arms and my neck,

  to show how much I love my homeboys.

  I learned how to sell the weed and the rock.

  These are the things I learned when I was growing up.

  The seven other boys in the class nod as Elias reads. They are fourteen and fifteen and sixteen years old, and he is describing their lives as well as his own, lives that brought them to Central Juvenile Hall not as mere delinquents, like most of the 1,600 kids warehoused here, but as HROs—high-risk offenders. Geri Vance is in my class, and Ronald Duncan, part of a broad assortment of kids, some with futures, some without, most of them painfully aware which category they fall into. “We’re the monsters they talk about on the news,” sixteen-year-old Chris, a gentle-mannered robber of pizza deliverymen, told me matter-of-factly when I first started teaching the Monday-night writing class two months ago. “We’re the ones you’re supposed to be afraid of.” I felt too guilty to tell him that I had, indeed, expected to find monsters when Sister Janet first led me to them. Hesitating outside the double-locked steel door to their unit, I had asked the Juvenile Hall chaplain rather nervously why she had chosen these kids, rather than some less hardened, more salvageable boys or girls, and Janet had just smiled cryptically and said, “Because these boys need you more.”

  Elias has a stoic strength about him, quiet and shy, in the past too nervous to read his work aloud. At first, he always just folded his eloquent essays on life in the streets into tiny squares of paper, passing them to me in silence so I could read them privately. Tonight, though, his anger has boiled up from the page and into the classroom.

  When I was growing up, I learned how to take

  another person’s car without a key,

  how to drive it and sell it, or just leave it somewhere.

  I learned how to sit down low

  and look out the windows for the enemy,

  to see them before they saw me.

  And, finally, when I was growing up,

  I learned how to load bullets into a gun.

  I learned how to carry it and aim it,

  and I learned how to shoot at the enemy,

  to be there for my homeboys, no matter what.

  “I hear you,” James says, an obvious longing for the street in his voice. He has just penned an essay on how he’d like to drive a car over his ex-girlfriend, and it is not entirely clear that he is joking. The kids, in their severe jailhouse haircuts and the neon orange jumpsuits reserved for HROs, look pale and fragile beneath the hall’s harsh lights, a few of them nursing adolescent wisps of mustache hair that only make them look younger. Yet, most of the boys in this room are on trial for thoroughly adult crimes—murder or attempted murder or armed robbery. They have witnessed and done terrible things. At the same time, these kids who could pull a trigger without a blink remain painfully timid about reading their work aloud, blushing, breathing hard, breaking a sweat just at the thought of standing before the class and baring themselves. Silence can claim the room like an advancing tide. Tonight, though, Elias, with his angry diatribe, is my unexpected hero. He has broken the ice.

  And then this seemingly hardened gangbanger, this kid with the huge tattoo on his arm announcing his gang allegiance, “Sureño 13,” surprises everyone. His voice drops nearly to a whisper, hoarse and urgent, his words taking a new direction.

  These are the things I learned when I was growing up.

  But this is what I want to know:

  I want to know, who is going to teach me

  how to pick out the right baby carriage for my little girl?

  Who is going to teach me how to make up a bottle,

  or to change a diaper, or to buy baby food?

  Who is going to teach me how to be a father?

  How to take care of my family?

  How to live a life—a normal life?

  These are the things I never learned growing up.

  Who will teach me now?

  When he finishes, the room is silent, not a cough, not a mutter, not a rustle of clothing, just the sound of Elias setting his paper down on the old Formica tabletop and, filtered through the room’s walls of metal, cinder block, and safety glass with wire mesh embedded within, the muffled jailhouse sounds of feet shuffling, toilets flushing, young voices competing with the television bolted to the wall of the common room. Elias’s eyes stay locked on his piece of paper. The sorrow and regret in his voice was so naked that the bravado and machismo that normally inhabit this room have evaporated like dew in the desert. Several boys are blinking hard.

  None of them speak the answer to Elias’s yearnings, though all know it well. The answer is: no one.

  Elias has been in the system for years, without benefit or effect. “Probation isn’t worth shit,” he says. For him, it was token supervision, a monthly call to his PO, who had two hundred other kids to watch over. Elias never left his gang, as the judge had ordered, and no one noticed. On probation, he carried a gun. He did drugs. He skipped school. “Camp was a joke, too,” he says of the county-run boot camps for delinquent youth. The gangs were recruiting there, inside a place where the kids were supposed to get away from the street life. There were race riots, drug use. It was ridiculous, he says, the system with its puny arsenal up against something far bigger and far deadlier. Elias’s best friend had died in his arms, shot in a drive-by. His uncles had all gone to prison. His beloved grandmother was murdered. It was natural for him, his birthright: He just kept committing crimes. Nothing made Elias want to change—until, three days after his arrest as an accomplice to murder, he learned he was to be a father. Then he craved responsibility, normalcy, a future. But by then it was too late.

  Now Elias keeps tucked in his right sock a color snapshot of his daughter, his most treasured possession. His baby was born while he sat in Juvenile Hall, and she has reached the age of eight months without ever being held by her father. They are likely to rem
ain apart a good deal longer. Because of the seriousness of his case, Elias will almost certainly be tried as an adult, with a lengthy sentence, possibly a life term, ahead of him. This is what it has come down to in Los Angeles’s juvenile justice system: life in prison for sixteen-year-old boys. Not just one or two or three like Elias, but hundreds of them.

  “There’s no one you can bring in to talk to someone and make them change, to make them not do crimes,” Elias says, when I ask him what the Juvenile Court could have done to keep him straight. “I honestly don’t think anything the system does is going to work. People have to change themselves. Nothing can make them change. Like for me, it wasn’t until I had my baby girl that I realized I wanted to change, to settle down and get an apartment and a job and take care of her. No speech from a judge could make me give a damn. I had to have a baby before I could change. And now it’s too late.”

  The words tumble out of Elias in a rush. In the space of fifteen minutes, he has spoken more than in ten previous classes, as if he was saving up his despair.

  “God made me so that I could learn how to commit crimes,” he finishes. “What’s some judge or some probation officer gonna do?” I see he is looking directly at me now with those dark eyes, an old man’s eyes in a sixteen-year-old’s face, and I think at the time, as I do now, that there is nothing more sad than the sight of hopelessness in one so young. It is a look that seems, for the moment, to be reflected in every boy’s face in the room.

  “God made me so I could do terrible things,” Elias says. “Why couldn’t God help me learn how to be a father?”

  PART ONE

  We’re Drowning

  Take a trip in my mind

  see all that I’ve seen,

  and you’d be called a

  beast, not a human being. . . .

  Fuck it, cause there’s

  not much I can do,

  there’s no way out, my

  screams have no voice no

  matter how loud I shout. . . .

  I could be called a

  low life, but life ain’t

  as low as me. I’m

  in juvenile hall headed

  for the penitentiary.

  GEORGE TREVINO, sixteen, “Who Am I?”

  PROLOGUE

  Two Boys, Thirty Years, and Other Numbers

  Gila County, Arizona

  June 8, 1964

  A MILDLY irritating, lewdly suggestive telephone call and a fifteen-year-old boy named Gerald Francis Gault: that’s all it took to bring the nation’s juvenile justice system to its knees.

  At the time, Gila County was, to put it charitably, something of a backwater. Arid even in winter, it was a place of trailer parks and gritty two-lane roads peeling ruler straight through the scrubby fry pan of the Upper Sonoran Desert. There are no major cities here. The county’s principal claims to fame include the fact that Zane Grey’s cabin was located here, and that the county seat, Globe, had a neighborhood so contaminated with asbestos-laden mining debris that the U.S. government had to remove its families and entomb its soil beneath gigantic concrete caps. Conservative and insular, it is safe to say that Gila County has never been the sort of place in which obscene phone calls, even pubescent ones, went over very well. So when young Gerry Gault and a snickering friend decided to while away the afternoon by telephoning a certain Mrs. Cook to tell her just how much they admired her physique, the local sheriff did not hesitate to act on the irate woman’s complaint.

  The sheriff hauled the fifteen-year-old to jail that same day, charging him as a juvenile delinquent. No one explained to Gerald his constitutional rights before demanding that he confess. No one offered him a lawyer or a dime to make a phone call. No one even took the trouble to tell his parents what had happened. They simply came home from work and found him missing. After canvassing the neighborhood, Gerald’s worried mother and father finally learned their son had been arrested. They went to the county detention hall, where a probation officer reluctantly told them that a court hearing had been scheduled to determine their son’s fate.

  A week later, without any formal charges filed and without ever hearing any testimony from the simmering Mrs. Cook, or anyone else, for that matter—in other words, without any actual evidence against the boy—the juvenile court judge for Gila County pronounced Gerald guilty and proclaimed him a delinquent.

  During the hearing, the judge forced Gerald to testify—there would be no claiming the Fifth in his courtroom, thank you. Then, when the boy failed to incriminate himself sufficiently, the judge proclaimed him “habitually immoral.” The judge based this finding upon his vague recollection of an allegation two years earlier—never proven or even heard in court—that Gerald took another boy’s baseball bat and glove. Again, this ruling was made without evidence or testimony from anyone.

  An adult found guilty of making such a lewd phone call—a misdemeanor roughly as serious as running a stop sign—could have been fined five to fifty dollars or, in rare instances, could have received a brief jail sentence under Arizona law in effect at the time. But the consequences for a juvenile judged guilty of such a charge and designated habitually immoral were profoundly different. As Gerald’s horrified parents sat in the judge’s chambers, stunned and intimidated into silence, the judge sentenced the boy to the state of Arizona’s juvenile prison for up to six years.

  Gerald had no attorney to represent him at this hearing, nor was he permitted to have one. He was presumed guilty, not innocent, from the moment he sat down on the hard wooden chair reserved for him in the judge’s chamber. No transcript was made of this secret “trial.” No transcript was needed, his parents learned later, because juvenile delinquents like Gerald had no right to appeal. He had no rights, period. Whatever the judge said, that was it. And Gerald and his family soon learned that this was not some high-handed, backroom Star Chamber peculiar to Gila County. This was how juvenile courts throughout the country operated, the judge curtly informed them.

  Three years passed before the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to do something about Gerald Gault’s case. When the High Court finally acted, its sweeping decision became a landmark: Juvenile courts throughout the nation were transformed by the simple notion that children should not be convicted of crimes without evidence of their guilt, without fair trials and lawyers and the chance to face their accusers. The turn-of-the-century intent behind the creation of a separate juvenile justice system—that it be informal, stripped of legal ritual, and dedicated to quickly helping troubled kids get back on track—was all well and good, the Supreme Court observed. But those noble intentions had spawned outrageous abuses—not only against poor Gerry Gault, but against thousands of other kids convicted more on whim than evidence, imprisoned on charges for which no adult could serve even a day behind bars.

  “Under our Constitution,” reads one particularly caustic passage of the Supreme Court decision, now know as In Re Gault, “the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court.”

  And so, on May 15, 1967, Gerry Gault’s adolescent prank had the extraordinary effect of bringing every juvenile court in every state of the Union to a grinding halt so that lawyers and court reporters and all the other trappings of real courtrooms could be put into place. When they started up again, the way in which society dealt with its troubled youth had forever changed.

  Thirty years later, the system has yet to recover from that one lewd phone call, or from the hidden price tag attached to the reforms it spawned.

  Los Angeles County Juvenile Court

  Los Padrinos Branch

  April 27, 1994

  Richard Perez, aka Shorty, a scrawny sixteen-year-old with an adolescent mustache atop an adolescent smirk, walked into the court Gerry Gault built exactly twenty-nine years and ten months after that fateful phone call in Gila County. It was Richard’s thirty-first court appearance in Los Angeles’s massive Juvenile Court, and his sixth criminal arrest. This time, though, he was in for murder, his world’s surest right of passage t
o adulthood—or, at least, to adult court and adult prison.

  Richard’s criminal career began with a car theft in 1990, when he was thirteen. At least, that’s when he officially entered the system. Truth is, he had been getting into trouble for years before that—cutting classes, throwing chairs and disturbing classrooms when he didn’t skip school. Long before his voice had changed, he had begun to disobey his parents with impunity. He joined a street gang, stayed out all night, stole from his family. Under old juvenile laws, such classic delinquent behavior would have been enough to get him into the system at age eight or nine. Today, such conduct can’t be used to incarcerate kids. If it’s not a crime for adults to run away or skip school or to tell their parents to fuck off, it would be unconstitutional to make it a crime for children. “I’m sorry,” a police desk sergeant had told Richard’s mother once, when she called desperate for help with her wayward son. “There’s nothing anyone can do unless he commits a crime.”

  So it took a car theft for the system to get hold of Richard, not at age eight, when programs to reform troubled kids work three out of four times, but at age thirteen, when the success rate is down to one out of four. Not that it mattered. Such measures of failure and success assume someone actually makes an effort with a kid. But the number of cases like Richard’s has become too overwhelming in recent years—annually, more than 5,300 auto thefts are committed by juveniles in LA—and the Juvenile Court, busy with more serious crimes, cannot keep up. With priority given to the 237 homicides, 3,746 robberies, 5,621 burglaries, 675 sexual crimes, 3,374 felonious assaults, 6,044 drug crimes, and 2,412 weapons possession offenses—all committed by juveniles in LA in a single year1—a mere car theft, like the thousands of graffiti cases that fill the court dockets, goes to the end of the line.