No Matter How Loud I Shout (35 page)

“But he didn't shoot anybody,” Mrs. Smith complains. She already knew from Royer that only the two adult gang members with Doughnut actually pulled their triggers. Doughnut was armed with a handgun and present at the ambush of Li'l Dondi, but he never fired.

“I know he didn't shoot, but he was still involved,” Royer tells the mother gently. “He's still responsible.”

Mrs. Smith searches Royer's eyes then, pleading with him for some sliver of hope. “But how do you know?”

Royer shrugs apologetically. “Because he told me.”

The woman grasps at one final straw, though her tone of voice makes it clear even she does not believe what she is suggesting. “Maybe he lied?”

Royer shakes his head sadly, as if to say he wished it were so. “Why would he lie? If he were going to lie, he would tell it the other way.” He sees Mrs. Smith nodding slightly, accepting it, accepting that her son is part of a murder. She looks ashen. Royer clears his throat and whispers, “Look at it this way. He's fifteen. Good thing for him. It's a premeditated death penalty case for an adult, but the worst that can happen to him is ten years. Consider him lucky.”

Mrs. Smith turns away, staring at the metal door her son will soon be walking through to enter the courtroom. She doesn't look as if she feels very lucky. She speaks again to the detective. “He's so scared, he has to have his night light on at night. What does that tell you?”

“I know what's in his heart,” Royer agrees. “In his heart, he's not a killer. But he did it anyway. In the interrogation, I told him I knew he hadn't shot. He didn't even know how to use that gun. He didn't even know if it was loaded. So I said, ‘I know you didn't want to kill that boy. Why'd you do it?' And he says, ‘I didn't want to look punked out in front of my homeboys.' ” It is a common explanation for juvenile murders, and a prime reason Los Angeles saw nearly eight hundred killings by street gangs in the past year.

Doughnut's mother shakes her head then, eyes closed. She doesn't know what is worse: that her son could be in such trouble, or that somehow her own flesh and blood had gone so wrong that he believed the lesser of two evils was to participate in a murder rather than risk being jeered at by his friends. She is a young woman with smile lines in the corners of her mouth, but pain has etched new furrows in her face. Without looking at Royer, she asks very quietly, “How old was the guy who got shot?” She winces when Royer answers, “Sixteen.”

“The kid's brain-dead,” Royer says. “Sooner or later, it's going to be a murder charge.” He touches her shoulder until she looks him in the eye again. “Listen, if he tells the truth, he might get a deal, maybe he can get in some kind of facility and learn something. Otherwise, he'll go to CYA till he's twenty-five and come out a hardened gangster. They say it's supposed to rehabilitate, but bottom line is, it's prison. It's not going to help him. You don't want that to happen.”

“I told him that,” Mrs. Smith says. By her tone of voice, two things are clear: One, she trusts Royer on this, even though it is exactly the sort of thing cops always say to coax a confession; and, two, her son will not listen to her. He may not be a murderer at heart, but neither will he inform on his home boys. One of the reasons gangs recruit fifteen-year-olds like him to participate in capital crimes is their irrevocable status as juveniles. Doughnut cannot go to adult court. His homeboys will expect him to be a stand-up guy, protecting the two adults who could face death sentences.

When his case is called and he is brought in for arraignment, Doughnut doesn't do himself much good. He spots his mother sitting with the detective and refuses to look at her again. The hearing is brief, consisting of a
reading of the charges, a determination by Commissioner Polinsky that Doughnut should remain detained, and the appointment of an attorney after the public defender declares a conflict of interest in the case, having represented Li'l Dondi in the past. Throughout, Doughnut scowls, mutters angrily to himself, shifting impatiently in his seat.

Polinsky spots Doughnut mouthing an obscenity at the detention order. “Your client seems unhappy,” Polinsky angrily tells the newly appointed attorney. “He doesn't seem to realize he is in here only by the grace of his age. This is going to take time, and he is not going to be released.” The commissioner then addresses the boy directly. “Do you understand?”

Chastened, Doughnut mumbles, “Yes, sir.” For the first time, he looks worried, as if it has just struck him that this time, his journey through the system will be a very different one. He has just realized that, even though he cannot be sent to an adult court or prison, ten years' imprisonment in the California Youth Authority is a very long time.

A few moments later, he is escorted back to lockup. His mother waves, but he still will not acknowledge her, fear and defiance battling for control of his face. Sharon is glad to see Polinsky in a bad mood—she figures he will be less likely to fall for Carla's glib charm today. As far as she is concerned, cases like Doughnut's are a colossal waste of time, money, and effort because there is really no question where he will end up. There is an eyewitness and a confession. After six months or a year of delays, he will be convicted and go to CYA until he is twenty-five, or close to it. There is no other option for a fifteen-year-old accomplice to murder.

“It's just the system spinnin' its wheels,” she mutters under her breath. The cops and lawyers sitting with her in the jury box say nothing, sitting there in stalwart silence, oblivious to the too-familiar spectacle unfolding before them.

She listens as Detective Royer tells Polinsky about another case he has coming up that day—a sixteen-year-old forced by his mother and stepfather to sell cocaine. The kid's dealing supports their drug habits, pays the rent, buys the groceries, he says. They encourage him to skip school. They even got him a gun to carry to protect his stash and their profits. Royer can make a case in Juvenile Court against the boy—the kid practically turned himself in, so desperate was he to escape his home—but the detective can't get the adult court DA to prosecute the parents for child endangerment. Insufficient evidence, he was told. And the kicker is, he says, for the last year, this kid was on probation, supposedly supervised by the court and a PO. Yet no one ever visited the home to see how he was doing.

“The kid's a classic victim,” Royer complains. “And he's the only one that pays.”

It's the kind of story that makes Sharon ashamed to admit what she does for a living.

·  ·  ·

Carla James is led in next. As Sharon rises to recite her violations for the court record, the probation officer is gripped by the overwhelming premonition that, in watching Doughnut's case, she has just witnessed an all-too-plausible preview of Carla's fate. Unless something is done here and now, she decides, Carla is going to end up charged with murder herself, bound for a long term of imprisonment like Doughnut. Either that, or the next time Sharon's beeper goes off at four in the morning, it's going to be tolling Carla's death, just as it had Li'l Dondi's.

“This young lady is out of control, Your Honor,” Sharon tells Commissioner Polinsky, urgency in her voice. “She needs to be restrained.”

Polinsky leafs through Sharon's report on Carla, then sees the Polaroid snapshot of the tattoo. He slams the file down and Carla, who had come in smiling, starts at the sound. He cuts off her explanations about it being her body, along with her sudden suggestion that she intends to have it surgically removed.

“You have come to the wrong court today, young lady,” the commissioner rails, eyes still wide behind his horn-rim glasses. “I have had it up to here.”

Carla watches as Polinsky returns to studying her file, each page turning with a sharp crackle of paper. The file is shaking in the judge's hands, he is so agitated—Carla has never seen this side of him before. She was used to being treated like a teacher's pet in Polinsky's courtroom, and had been expecting a mild admonishment and a sentence back to camp. Camp doesn't worry her: She'd have plenty of friends there, and she'd be running the place again soon enough, she figures, like always. But then Polinsky surprises her.

“You know, I could just commit you to CYA right now. I have more than four years over your head. You've had more than enough chances to succeed, and I'm not sure what else to do with you.”

Carla stares at him openmouthed. She has heard stories about CYA. Carla's lawyer is sputtering. Even Sharon is astonished. Six months in camp was the most she had hoped for. This does not sound like Commissioner Polinsky, who very seldom sends any but the most egregious, unrepentant failures to youth prison, and who had counted on Carla to become a bright spot on an otherwise depressing caseload.

But like many others in the Los Angeles juvenile system, Polinsky is frustrated by the paucity of options for sentencing kids. For the privileged few who have parents willing and able to pay for out-of-county or even out-of-state treatment programs, where the cost can run into the thousands very quickly, there are special college prep programs with locked campuses, wilderness programs, secure drug and alcohol programs, therapeutic schools tailor-made to fit certain kids' needs—the possibilities are nearly endless. Judge Dorn is currently entertaining a proposal to sentence a young arsonist into a private program in another state—a kid who, had his father not been a wealthy physician, would have ended up in CYA. For kids with money behind them, justice—at least when it comes to sentencing—is for sale.

But for the vast majority of children sentenced in Los Angeles Juvenile Court—the Doughnuts and the Carlas and the Ronald Duncans—the county must foot the bill. And there are just four basic sentences for them.

There is HOP, by far the most common result in the thirty thousand delinquency cases brought to court each year. There is “suitable placement,” a network of public and private foster homes supervised by the Probation Department and reserved for about twenty-three hundred mostly nonviolent kids who cannot live with—or do not have—parents. Kids who are runaway risks usually cannot go to suitable placement—there is no security. Then there are the twenty-six detention camps run by the Probation Department for forty-four hundred kids in a variety of rural settings from the desert to Malibu—locked, rigorous facilities that are good at keeping gangbangers in line while they are inside, but not designed for kids with emotional, learning, or psychological problems, or drug or alcohol dependencies. (This is something of an oddity, since most juvenile delinquents have precisely these problems.)
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And the fourth and final option within the juvenile system is the California Youth Authority, the state's massive system of juvenile prisons, the largest in the nation, where rehabilitation is the nominal mission for its eighty-seven hundred “wards,” but where gang wars, race riots, stabbings, and rapes are regular afflictions, mirroring, albeit to a smaller degree, the nightmarish world of America's adult prisons.
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With few exceptions, every peg has to be fit into one of these four basic holes. The nagging problem with the first three options offered by the LA system is that they are all short-term solutions at best. Sooner or later, they all dump the child back in the same environment where their criminal behavior began in the first place—the same gang-infested streets in the inner city, the same dysfunctional home in the suburbs, or the same abusive,
drug-addicted, or ineffectual parents. Follow-up supervision, once intensive, has been cut back or eliminated. Consequently, the failure rate is very high. The fourth option, the California Youth Authority, can postpone this inevitable return for years—but imprisonment is viewed as the juvenile system's last resort, the last stop for kids beyond reach. Every kid that goes to CYA is an admission by the Juvenile Court that it has failed.
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And the recidivism rate is even higher than for the first three options.

“You have been given every opportunity to succeed,” Commissioner Polinsky tells Carla. “And it's not like you don't have the brains, or the ability. We know you do, which just makes matters worse. You have no excuse. You are making these choices, understanding full well what you are doing. So you are going to CYA.”

Then, seeing he has sufficiently terrified the girl—Carla's eyes are wide, disbelieving—he adds these words: “For a ninety-day evaluation.”

He had no intention of actually committing the girl to CYA—he just wanted her attention. For the time being, he says, he will postpone sentencing while she submits to psychological and social examination at CYA to help him choose the best possible sentence for her. In truth, he has already made up his mind on what that should be; the real purpose of Carla's CYA trip is to give her a look at where she could end up if she continues to commit crimes. Polinsky wants to show Carla exactly where her next felony will bring her.

“We'll see you in three months,” the commissioner says. “Then perhaps we can figure out what to do with you.”

·  ·  ·

By coincidence of court orders and backlogged dockets, Geri Vance, Elias Elizondo, and Carla James all end up at CYA for their evaluations at the same time. The boys go to one of the state's two large reception centers for processing new inmates, this one located in Norwalk, in southern LA County.

Elias returns first. Even though his plea bargain bars him from being committed as a juvenile, he can still be housed at CYA for the first half of his fifteen-to-life sentence—if CYA will accept him. But he blows the mandatory ninety-day evaluation, repeatedly disobeying orders from the staff, lying about his background, and ending his stay by getting into a fight with a gang member from Northern California (Hispanic gangs from the two ends of California are traditional enemies). CYA wouldn't even keep him the full three months—they sent him back to Central Juvenile Hall in chains. Elias has erased the initial positive impression he had brought
with him—that he was a bright, sensitive kid with only one violent crime on his record and a huge potential for rehabilitation—and replaced it with the image of a gang-entrenched troublemaker unwilling to let go of his criminal values for even three months, when his entire future was at stake. His CYA caseworker—having received numerous letters and calls from the mother of the man killed by Elias's gang—writes a profoundly negative report about him to the court, making a direct sentence to adult prison almost certain. Why should CYA take a chance on Elias, the caseworker suggested, when all its facilities are overcrowded, and there are plenty of other kids willing to at least try to do better in order to stay out of the penitentiary?