No Matter How Loud I Shout (34 page)

But on this day, she feels none of the satisfaction a thriving probationer normally brings her, for she has learned anew today just how fleeting success can be in her business. Carla James is in lockup, on her way to who knows what. And poor Li'l Dondi is even worse off. He had been in a week earlier, doing fine, speaking about his new job, sporting a new leather coat, shyly talking about the girlfriend who pushed him to stay straight. It had been an ordinary, uneventful, mildly positive conversation, no hint of what was to come. He had sat there with his leg crossed casually, a kid Sharon was slowly but surely pulling back from the precipice. He had started thinking about the future, in small but clear ways, a pleasant, husky teenager who had been vaguely surprised when Sharon pointed out that he had stayed straight for an entire year for the first time since he was eleven years old. Then he had smiled with pride at the observation. “Gonna stay that way, too,” he promised.

“But you're still hangin' with the same old crew, aren't you?” Sharon had asked. “Still got those same friends tryin' to drag you back down.”

Dondi had nodded and shrugged. The judges always order kids to cut off ties with their old gangs and crime partners, but POs rarely try to enforce this condition for probationers who are otherwise doing well. Half those seventeen thousand juvenile probationers in LA would have to be locked up if they did. How do you go Home On Probation without going home?

“You know how it is, Ms. Stegall,” Li'l Dondi had said less than a week before a bullet cut his brain in two. “You in, you in for life.”

·  ·  ·

The rest of client day is a mix of good and bad. A girl comes in and reveals she is going to junior college, an unexpected and pleasant surprise. The next girl due in calls to say she is pregnant and won't be coming. Two boys fail to show up for their appointments. A teenager who swears he has quit his gang—“Those people scare me,” he vows—says he is now afraid to go to school because he has no protection. He just stays home and watches television all day. Then another kid, nicknamed Poindexter because he is such a studious straight-arrow, shows up for his first appointment with Sharon after being convicted of carrying a gun to school.

“Why are you here?” Sharon asks, after looking over his record. He is an
A-student with no cuts, suspensions, or any other indicator of delinquency on his record. He has never been in trouble.

“Because I had a gun,” he mumbles, staring at his shoe tops.

“Why?”

“Because I was afraid.”

Sharon nods. He is no gangbanger. He is no sociopath. He got the gun from his mother's boyfriend, because he had been pushed around, beaten, and threatened so many times at school, he didn't know what else to do. He is deeply ashamed of having broken the law. But now the pressure on him to join a gang for protection—or to carry a weapon again—will be even more enormous, and there isn't a lot Sharon can do, except get him into another school and hope for the best. He is in the seventh grade.

Later, a stooped man with salt and pepper hair, leaning heavily on a cane, comes in alone to see Sharon. He supports four children on a cafeteria worker's $460 monthly wage. His oldest son is on juvenile probation. He sighs repeatedly as he apologizes in halting English to Sharon, then pulls from his pants pocket a crumpled plastic Baggie with three rocks of cocaine inside. “I wasn't sure what this was,” he says. “I found it in Jesus's room, and my wife and I are worried. I think it's drugs.”

Sharon grabs the bag and tells the man, “Yes, it's drugs. Very bad drugs. It's a good thing you didn't get stopped on the way over here.” She is shaking her head. She likes this man, but his son, who entered the system at age sixteen and has since turned eighteen, is another story. He's a pleasant-enough kid, but he has sticky fingers. He smiled his way onto informal probation for a burglary two years earlier, then got arrested for stealing a car (case dismissed for lack of a witness willing to come to court), then got arrested again for grand theft after he and a friend brazenly walked out of a department store with five hundred dollars' worth of clothes piled in their arms. He got probation and, after working with another PO, was recently reassigned to Sharon's caseload.

By the time she got him, he had missed thirty school days in the past two months, failed to perform the eighty hours of community service attached as a condition of his probation (“I just didn't feel like it,” he later tells Sharon—after she busts him), and he had refused to obey his parents, disappearing for four days. He had just returned, filthy and hung over. The Probation Department remained unaware of all this—his last probation officer had done no supervision and had told Sharon he was doing fine. Now here was Jesus's dad with a bag of crack and a desperate look on his face.

Sharon leaves the office a short time later, finds Jesus at home, handcuffs him, reads him his rights, and hauls him off to Juvenile Hall on a probation violation. He is angry and defiant, furious at his father, at Sharon, at the system he always assumed he would beat.

Later, though, when she sees him after a week in the hall, he seems transformed—calm, relaxed, almost playful. He isn't mad at his father anymore for turning him in. Instead, he says he feels almost relieved. “I needed to chill. Things were getting too crazy on The Outs.”

“Isn't it sad these kids have to be locked up to become kids again?” Sharon muses later. “Out on the street, they walk the walk, they talk the talk, they harden over like rocks. But in the hall, there's no drive-bys, no peer pressure, they can relax. And they turn into little boys again. Until they get back out. Then it starts all over. It's so damn sad.”

·  ·  ·

Twenty-five years ago, when Los Angeles's Watts ghetto neighborhoods erupted in riots, Sharon Stegall was a sixteen-year-old girl surveying the rubble that had been the grocery story where she had worked after school. As she stood there astride her bicycle, gaping at the desolation, a policeman suddenly appeared, gun drawn, shouting, “For the flip of a quarter, nigger bitch, I'd blow your head off.”

She never knew if the cop took her to be a looter, or if he was simply motivated by a racist hatred. But she survived that day, though it colors her work as a probation officer—she knows her kids face the same sort of situations even now, children for whom violence appears from all sides, children for whom there are no good guys. The neighborhoods are war zones. Gangs lay claim to them. Policemen eye them not as kids, but as potential threats. They all know what “Assume the position” means, without having to see it in movies or on TV. Sharon visits her probationers and sees their little brothers and sisters playing not house or doctor or fireman, but drug dealer, crack house, and bank robber—their heroes and role models. Little kids actually standing there passing play money and bogus rocks of cocaine to one another over the counter, then pretending to smoke or shoot. She has seen this with her own eyes, this last gasp of childhood fantasy, modeled after the most successful adults on the block.

By the time these kids end up on Sharon's caseload, their ability to play and imagine can be completely destroyed. She sees it every day, the anger that wells up in some of her probationers when she asks them where they'll be in five years. They balk at the question, refuse to answer, but when she pushes them, all too many say, “Dead. Okay? Can I go now?”

There's the problem, Sharon figures. Most of her kids have no imagination left. They have no play in them, no power to see possibilities beyond the moment. And if you can see no future, if you expected to be dead by age twenty-one, what was the point of caring about anything? What was the point of having a conscience or feeling sorry for anyone you hurt if you were terminally ill? Sharon's probationers—like the kids Sister Janet meets in the hall—tell her that all the time, that it doesn't matter what they do, because they are, in essence, dead already. And this hopelessness, this living death, does not stop in the barrios and ghettos—she and her colleagues hear the same thing from the rich suburban kids, from children of privilege, even from the sons of two Juvenile Court bench officers. This is what makes so many of the kids of Juvenile Court so incredibly hard, so resistant to reform. This is what concerns Sharon the most.

And so she sees a good part of her job as rekindling in her kids a more wholesome ability to imagine, to grasp at a brighter future—giving them back something that should be innate. She tries to show them a different side of the system, a new realm of possibilities—that a black woman from Watts once threatened by a policeman's gun simply because of her race could go on to work as a federal park ranger and forester at Yosemite, as she had before becoming a probation officer. She tells them to drive down a certain street where they can see the name Stegall on a school building—her mother, an honored former teacher, had an entire school named after her, she informs them with pride. She talks to kids who have never strayed from their barrios about how she has traveled the world, started her own business. She shows them that Jaguar she drives. “I've done things these kids can only dream of,” Sharon says, then corrects herself. “No, I've done things these kids
can't
dream of. That's what I'm up against. That's what I try to change.”

It is what she almost finished doing with Li'l Dondi. It is what she is desperately trying to do with Carla James.

·  ·  ·

The courtroom is half full as Commissioner Gary Polinsky tries to sort through his clogged calendar. Sharon sits in the jury box waiting for her violation cases to be called—Jesus with his bag of crack and worried dad, and Carla James, with her tattooed stomach and infuriating resistance to change. The first case with Jesus should be an easy one, but Carla has charmed this Juvenile Court commissioner before. Sharon is worried she'll pull off another successful manipulation of the system.

First, though, there is an arraignment to be held. Sharon watches with
interest as Polinsky tells his bailiff to bring out a fifteen-year-old boy named Kelvin Smith, known on the street as Doughnut, a classic repeat offender long ignored by the system, with ten arrests since age eleven for theft, burglary, battery, and trespass. The Sixteen Percenter pattern holds true in his case: Most of the early charges invariably were dismissed or dropped or led to minimal probation, allowing him to continue hanging with the Hoover Street Crips gang he idolized, committing more crimes, becoming a child with no imagination, one of LA's living dead. He could barely read at the second-grade level.

After his eighth arrest, Doughnut had finally landed in probation camp, where he failed miserably but was still released after five months to make room for older, more serious offenders. One day later, he stole a car and was arrested driving it. Yet, once again, despite his long record, he was released, still on probation, though he had never in four years obeyed a single probation condition or court order. His record was such a jumble, and his offenses sufficiently “minor,” the system just couldn't find time to deal with Doughnut.

Now, six months later, his car theft charge still unresolved, he is back in court, this time accused of participating in the ambush of Sharon's probationer, Li'l Dondi. The Juvenile Court's abject failure had shot down one of its budding successes. Time for the system to pay attention to Doughnut.

At the moment, life support machines continue to keep Li'l Dondi's heart and lungs going, so the charge against Doughnut remains attempted homicide. But the first-degree murder papers have already been drawn up and are sitting in Peggy Beckstrand's office, waiting to be filed the moment Dondi dies, an epitaph for a sixteen-year-old written in advance of the inevitable. Seeing those papers gave Sharon chills, like seeing a tombstone carved for someone still living.

Slouching in a seat in the middle of the gallery is a tall, ponytailed man in a nylon baseball jacket. He is talking quietly with a woman whose face is contorted in anguish. The man is Hawthorne Police Detective James Royer, who beeped Sharon with the news about Li'l Dondi, and who later helped arrest and interrogate Doughnut. Sharon figures at first that the grieving woman must be Dondi's mother, but it turns out she is
Doughnut
's mother. She ought to be furious with Royer for bringing her son in, but she has no one else to turn to in this place—no lawyer to represent her interests, no familiar faces, nothing but fear of the unknown. In Juvenile Court, the defense lawyers represent the kids, not the parents. The defenders even instruct kids to refuse to talk about their cases with their
mothers and fathers, for fear they could be subpoenaed by the prosecution and forced to testify (unlike the marital privilege that protects spouses from incriminating one another, there is no matching parental privilege). Nor can parents participate in any discussions between lawyer and child, even when decisions are made about strategies that will profoundly affect a child's future—an ultimate irony in a court designed to bring families together. So Mrs. Smith has only Detective Royer to turn to.

In Hawthorne, he has a reputation as a fair man and a good cop, the sort who goes out of his way to help kids and families when he can, who tries to line up jobs for gang members who tire of the street life and who would gladly go straight if they could find any alternatives. Mrs. Smith views the system as so unfriendly that she is drawn to the man who arrested her son as her only ally. She is a single mother with two jobs and an abiding anger at a Juvenile Court she considers more an accomplice than a deterrent to her son's deliquency. Now, after so many years of inaction, she complains, the system wants to hammer her boy.

“How can they charge my son with doing the shooting?” she asks Royer, her voice a trembling monotone.

“It's called the felony murder rule,” the detective explains. “Like when someone sticks up a liquor store and shoots someone, the getaway driver gets charged, too.”