No Matter How Loud I Shout (59 page)

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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.”

Meanwhile, Central Juvenile Hall has been unable to pay for repairs more than a year after earthquake damage crippled the facility, closing off several wings and even its main entrance. At the start of 1995, the abandoned portion of the structure is an eerie place, barren and disused by day. At night, with steam seeping from cracked subterranean pipes and drifting into the air through fissures in the earth, dozens of feral cats breed and prowl the grounds, looking for food.

Central Juvenile Hall, along with LA's two other detention halls, have a rated capacity to hold thirteen hundred kids. Most days they hold more than two thousand children in custody. The halls have responded to the crunch of kids and the escalating tensions and violence that result by issuing caustic pepper spray to their staff members, a measure long resisted but now embraced in the wake of the killing of the staff member at Dorothy Kirby. Now, several juveniles a week get doused with the paralyzing, painful “chemical restraint”—though it is not as severe as the military chemical agent used at CYA.

These problems are likely to worsen soon: One of these halls may have to be closed because of the budget cuts, along with several of the probation camps, which would force the system to shorten detention time for kids who commit crimes and who desperately need to be kept off the street. The policy of detaining all kids arrested for illegal possession of firearms, already spotty at best, may have to be relaxed or halted entirely to free up bed space. One prosecutor estimates four out of ten kids arrested with guns get a walk, despite the policy.

At the same time more juvenile offenders are being turned loose, the mechanism for supervising them on the streets—the probation officers, the ears and eyes of the Juvenile Court—are having their inadequate ranks further shorn by the budget shortfall. Already unworkable caseloads of two hundred kids to supervise will balloon into a thousand, possibly several thousand, the product of planned layoffs. These huge loads of probationers will then be monitored through something called the Probation Bank. Instead of actively working with and supervising these children, helping them to stay straight, probation officers will enter the names of their juvenile charges into computer banks that are connected to law enforcement computers. If any of the kids on the list get arrested or charged with a crime, a computer message will automatically be sent to the probation officer assigned to that kid, so that the PO will know there's a problem.

Juvenile probation in LA will come down to this for a majority of kids who commit crimes: The PO will watch a computer every day. Otherwise, the kids will be on their own, free to go on doing what they want.

This blow to the Juvenile Court is worsened further by another budget cut: a small but effective program that devotes fifty-eight probation officers to work with elementary and middle school kids before they join street gangs is on the chopping block, along with a companion program that puts POs directly in schools with their probationers.

The budget cuts—now, as in the past—target the juvenile programs designed to deal with minor offenders before they commit serious crimes, the very programs that common sense and every serious study of juvenile crime suggest should be beefed up. These are the programs, however inadequate, that target the repeat offenders, the Sixteen Percenters. Instead of strengthening these programs, the old priorities that have crippled Juvenile Court are being observed: Preserve the lockups, the Youth Authority, the detention programs for the most serious, hardened offenders least likely to be rehabilitated, and cancel efforts to turn around the young, impressionable first- and second-time offenders.

The budget cuts, then, are creating a Juvenile Court destined to fail even more often than before. That failure—in the form of repeat offenders—will increase the need for more lockups and more programs for the hardened, dangerous kids, which will in turn increase the pressure to try more children as adults because, the critics of Juvenile Court will argue, the system isn't working.

Most every one who works in the system—judges, defenders, even prosecutors—decry this cycle. Yet they can't seem to stop it.

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Deputy District Attorney Peggy Beckstrand, for one, has given up trying. She has finally washed her hands of juvenile law. Her long-awaited transfer has come in, bringing her to an adult branch of the District Attorney's Office, where she is trying adult criminal cases—a much more satisfying pursuit, she says. “It wore me down, fighting every day to make a dysfunctional system work. I don't miss it a bit.”

All the prosecutors that worked for her have moved on as well, each of them to more coveted assignments in adult court, replaced by a new troop of neophyte lawyers charged with making decisions that alter children's lives daily. The same sort of turnover has drained the experienced lawyers from the Public Defender's Office as well.

Deputy Probation Officer Sharon Stegall, meanwhile, is trying to start her
own business and talks often of quitting the Probation Department, though those who know her well say she will never give up working with kids.

Sherry Gold, one of the top appointed lawyers at Thurgood Marshall Branch, has been looking for a job with a law firm that handles adult court appointments in the San Fernando Valley. She, too, has grown tired of laboring in a juvenile justice system that she fears is headed for extinction, though she is not yet sure she will quit.

“The kids I represented ten, fifteen years ago were so different. They were still kids. They knew right from wrong, more or less,” Gold says over morning coffee at her favorite spot across from Thurgood Marshall. “Now they have no respect for life. They seem like they are brain-dead. You can't reach them. Sometimes I try to shock them a little. I say, ‘Hey, don't look at me like I'm just some white bitch preaching to you. Why don't you go to school? Why do you hang out with a gang?' All I get is ‘I dunno. I dunno.'

“They're a lost generation. And nothing we're doing now will change that. My husband hears me on the phone talking to these kids and says, ‘Why are you wasting your breath? Don't you know you're saying the same things over and over, and it's not accomplishing anything?' I hate to say it, but I'm starting to see that he's right. I don't know how much longer I can do this.”

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Sister Janet Harris is not giving up any time soon. She is still chaplain at Central Juvenile Hall, still walking the units, looking for kids who need her. Of late, she has been trying to find some way to reopen Elias Elizondo's case, so far without luck. And she has found a fourteen-year-old boy in the hall with dozens of aliases, no family, no official existence, no future, no one in the system who is interested in him—and, by the way, he's a genius. Literally. She and several Jesuit volunteers working in the hall have taken the time to get to know this boy. They learned he had been raised since he was a toddler by street gang members, becoming a kind of homeless mascot passed around from crash pad to crash pad. He would go to school for the older gangbangers, assuming their identities, doing their homework, taking their tests, earning them A's and helping them appear to be fulfilling court orders to go to school. He has never taken a class under his own name, though he is always in school for one criminal or another. He devours books in a day. He has no values, other than those of a street criminal. The system has no idea what to do with him—it took fourteen years just to notice him. “They can't even figure out what his real name is, or his birthday,” Janet says. “He's our latest project. We have to find a home for him somewhere. In another reality, this boy could be president.”