No Matter How Loud I Shout (3 page)

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 remain 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?”

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?”

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 to 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 year
¹
—a mere car theft, like the thousands of graffiti cases that fill the court dockets, goes to the end of the line.

And so, Richard was released the day he was arrested. Five months passed before he was summoned back to court to face his charges. During that time, he ignored a court order to attend school, to obey his parents, and to quit his gang. He figured no one from Juvenile Court would have the time to check, and he was right. He capped off his show of contempt by failing to appear for his thrice-delayed trial. “I knew they couldn't do shit to me,” he would later observe. “I was havin' too much fun to bother.”

A month later, the young fugitive was rearrested and brought into court, where he cut a deal and pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of joyriding. His single mother said she was sick of his foul mouth and gangster friends. “You keep him,” she told the judge. He got probation, lived for a while in a group home, then went home with his father.

From the moment he settled his case, Richard busted curfew nightly, got high, and continued gangbanging, all in violation of his probation conditions. But his probation officer had nearly two hundred kids to supervise, which she accomplished primarily by talking to them on the telephone once a month (twice a month for the troublesome kids). She didn't
even catch the phony address and disconnected phone number Richard had supplied as his father's—until Richard's dropping out of the ninth grade provoked her to actually try and visit him. No one in the system had checked on his home life before releasing him. The PO found an empty lot where his house was supposed to be.

Richard remained a fugitive for another month, when police caught him behind the wheel of another stolen car. Released again after a few hours in custody, he stayed on probation and landed back in the same group home, conveniently located near his gang turf.

Three months later, Richard and three other members of a new, violent street gang he had joined, called the Young Crowd, started a riot at a hospital. Intent on visiting a homeboy with a gunshot wound, they had tussled with security guards rather than wait fifteen minutes for official visiting hours to begin. “I'll be back, I'll do a drive-by, I'll kill your motherfuckin' asses,” Richard shrieked to the guards and the nurses who turned him out. A new judge took over his case, kept him on probation, and returned him to the same group home with the same no-gangs, go-to-school conditions he had yet to obey.

Six months later, in August 1993, Richard, by then sixteen, was arrested for participating in a swarming attack on a motorist who stopped near a park on the gang's turf, only to be beaten badly, his car stolen. After his arrest, Richard sat in court in bold gang style—a kind of Charlie Chaplin positioning of his feet under the defense table—as derogatory a gesture in his universe as extending his middle finger at the judge. But no one noticed or cared. The result: case dismissed, more probation, same group home. Richard celebrated by having his gang moniker, “Shorty,” tattooed onto his back, and by breaking a middle-aged woman's nose with one vicious punch so he could steal the six-pack of beer she had just bought from a liquor store that had refused him service.