No Matter How Loud I Shout (31 page)

Then one night she spotted Bradley's unmistakable broad shoulders and blocky silhouette in a Beverly Hills restaurant. On impulse, she got down on her knees and crept toward him across the crowded restaurant, hands clasped in supplication, to convince him to participate in her gang program. “I'm begging you to help these boys,” Sister Janet said, planting her elbows next to his wineglass, the mayor and his dinner companions gaping in astonishment.

She laughs ruefully at the memory now, a trifle embarrassed, but not the least apologetic. “It was important. And I wanted him to hear me.” The mayor heard her, all right, and then, as Janet tells it, turned her down flat, leaving orders to keep Sister Janet away from him.

But someone else took an interest in Sister Janet's ideas and dedication—the former football great and actor Rosie Greer, who went on to become a minister. Greer, in turn, got Jackie Kennedy to show up a short time later to help raise funds for the gang program. The former First Lady ended up cruising the barrio with Janet in Greer's station wagon, littered
with soda cans and fast-food wrappers. Before attending a press conference and a fund-raiser, Greer, Janet, and Jackie O. stopped in the barrio to play dominoes with gang members.

“The program really took off after that,” Janet recalls. “I've been doing this ever since.”

Sister Janet Harris is a youthful and slim sixty-three, with short silver hair, pale blue eyes behind metal-rimmed spectacles, and a manner that at times seems distracted, so immersed is she in the daily lives of the inhabitants of Juvenile Hall. Her workdays begin early and end late, filled with recruiting volunteers, organizing dances, planning church services and Bible study groups, staging plays and musicals, and lining up alternative lawyers and social workers for kids who have little contact with the professionals appointed to represent them. She spends hours a day roaming the different units in the lockup, and can only rarely be found in the cramped and chilly chaplain's office adjacent to the Juvenile Hall chapel. Still, her office is one of the few places on the grounds where the door stands open and unlocked throughout the day. Though theft is endemic in this place, her office has never been victimized.

She never planned on becoming an advocate for dispossessed children. As a teenager living in the Bronx, Janet had been an aspiring actress. Her father always told her she'd be on the stage someday. But on the eve of a critical audition for a Broadway play, just when those ambitions were close to being realized (or dashed, she says now), she decided against pursuing show business. Instead, she joined an order of nuns in California, the Sisters of the Presentation, where she took her vows, then attended the University of San Francisco. (Many people saw the two career choices as utterly contradictory, but not Janet, who as a nun went on to earn a master's degree in filmmaking and has collaborated on several movie projects, including helping with the film
Zoot Suit
.)

After college, Janet took a teaching assignment at a Catholic elementary school in an East Los Angeles barrio. Next to her convent stood a foster home for chronically delinquent boys, and it was here that Janet found her calling. A half hour of volunteer work at the foster home each day after school soon blossomed into three hours and weekends, time that left her energized and wanting more. She began spending time with gang kids, at first on her own, then through the LA County antigang program. She avoided the standard approach the church had always used with gang members and their families—Scriptures, preaching, prayer, penance—focusing instead on finding work for gang members, helping them get
into junior colleges and trade schools, pairing them with volunteers and mentors who could offer them alternatives to violence and crime.

Gang members were at first dubious of this meddling white nun from New York. But when she refused to betray a confidence to police detectives seeking information on a gang killing—risking jail herself when the angry investigators accused her of obstructing justice—Janet gained enormous respect from the Latino gang members she was trying to reach. Several eventually came forward themselves with information for the police in order to spare her the handcuffs.

In the 1980s, Janet left the streets and began working in juvenile halls and, in 1989, she became chaplain at Central Juvenile Hall, becoming one of the few points of consistency the kids here recognize. Consistency is no small issue: Odds are a repeat offender will get a different judge, a new lawyer, another prosecutor, and a new series of probation officers (one to evaluate him before his arrest, another to investigate him before his sentencing, yet another to supervise him once he's back on the street). In theory, the court file is supposed to provide consistency that the human component lacks, a body of knowledge that helps the system avoid starting from scratch each time a child walks in the door. In practice, though, most judges and lawyers haven't the time or inclination to read anything in the file beyond the most recent piles of paper (the information superhighway has no on-ramps to Juvenile Court—in many respects it remains a manually typed, carbon-copy world, circa 1961). A ward's history before the court is often ignored or misplaced, especially when more than one branch of the court is involved (and worse still when there is a different jurisdiction). Continuity, cooperation, communication, even the mere sharing of files is an iffy thing between the disparate parts of the sprawling LA Juvenile Court—dozens of files, the complete and irreplaceable record of a child's life, are misplaced every month. Some of the ten branches of the court simply refuse to send them, and judges elsewhere have their clerks create “dummy” files, a name that aptly summarizes the sparse contents of such makeshift remedies. Kids who want to hide their pasts can do so easily, simply by slightly modifying a birth date or a name. At the same time, children who want and need help, and whose past should help them get it, are passed over—which is why a George Trevino, with his eight years as a ward of the Juvenile Court's dependency branch, could be hustled into the delinquency side of the court and be treated as if he had no history in the system at all.

These sorts of communication breakdowns work both ways. To most kids, the Juvenile Court is nothing more than a long stay in a dank holding cell,
followed by a few minutes in a bright and noisy courtroom full of nameless faces speaking a legalistic language they can't follow. When the lockup bus brings them back to the hall, often after eight at night, many cannot say for certain the purpose of the hearing that brought them to court, or the name of the judge or the prosecutor they faced that day, or even the name of the lawyer representing them. But a good number of them know Sister Janet's name. They know if they ask her for help, she will do her best, no questions asked. They know she does not condone their crimes or violence, yet she still invests countless hours and endless effort on their behalf, trying to eke some measure of individual treatment out of a system that is best at crafting blanket solutions for the many. She makes a distinction between being a gang member and being a criminal, because, unlike virtually every other worker in the system, Janet has known many gang members who have never been arrested or accused of a crime. If the kids here take away nothing else from their stay in Juvenile Hall, those who come to know Sister Janet leave certain of one thing: that at least one person cares what happens to them.

For all too many, Janet has found, this is a new and startling revelation.

·  ·  ·

“This is just not acceptable,” Sister Janet is saying to George Trevino this afternoon, her voice shaking with anger as they sit together in an empty classroom in the hall's school building. “I am not going to let this go.”

George nods, glad to have Janet as an ally, but he also shrugs, the expression of a kid conditioned to accept as inevitable the hard realities of a system charged with both sustaining and restraining him. “It's okay,” George says quietly, reversing roles and comforting Janet.

“No, it's not all right, George. Those poems are precious. They are important. They
mean
something.”

As often happens with the personal possessions of the kids imprisoned here, the Juvenile Hall staff has lost George's poems. A bound and typeset version of twenty-five poems George painstakingly assembled is missing after a seemingly admiring supervisor on his unit asked to borrow it, then misplaced the boy's most prized possession. A few weeks earlier, his handwritten originals were seized as contraband and lost by the hall staff, making today's loss all the more devastating to the boy. Sister Janet has raised such a stink that the administration has begun searching every room and every boy and girl in the place, all nine hundred of them, assuming someone stole them, though Janet suspects the supervisor's carelessness is a more likely culprit. The same staff person had, months earlier, begged Janet to round up some donated books to give the kids. Janet spent the
next several weeks pulling together a small library of several hundred paperbacks, which she then had delivered to the lockup's loading dock with the help of several volunteers. Three weeks later, Janet asked a boy if he had gotten access to the new books. “What new books?” the kid replied. Janet then learned that the supervisor had never bothered to fetch the donated books, though she had been told of their arrival immediately, and the residents of the hall had been clamoring for reading material for many days. When Janet went to see what had become of the books, she found them still sitting in open boxes outside on the unsheltered concrete dock, rotting and ruined by a month of rain and sun.

“The indifference so many of the staff here show these kids is incredible,” Janet says, wanting George to understand that he has not been singled out. A day earlier, she tells George, one of the boys in the writing class, Chris, convicted of robbing a pizza man with several other juveniles—one of whom shot and wounded the pizza man at the conclusion of the robbery—was told to come over to his unit supervisor's desk. “Here,” a detention officer told him, thrusting a dirty, used manila envelope at him without looking up from the paperwork on his desk. “This is yours.”

Chris had been working all year to make up for his past truancy and school problems, earning high grades and completing all the credits needed for a high school diploma—an academic achievement not all that common in this place. His teachers have been encouraging him to think about college. He had been expecting some sort of graduation ceremony, some small recognition, but when he opened up the tattered envelope just handed him, he saw it contained his diploma. No congratulations, no handshake. This is a kid who grew up in the street, whose loved ones have been claimed by prison, murder, and suicide, who has no one but his keepers to look to for some measure of approval. “You could just see him shut down when he realized what the staff thought of his accomplishment,” Janet says. “The thrill of his achievement—and it is quite an achievement here—just drained right out of him.”

Janet made a fuss, of course—first congratulating him herself, with hugs and praise, and then by complaining loud enough to the hall administration, until someone agreed to organize a small ceremony for Chris and three other kids on the high-risk offenders unit who had earned their diplomas. It helped, a little. “Would it have killed them to show a little enthusiasm?” Janet wonders aloud with George Trevino. “Would it have killed them to put his degree in a clean envelope?”

George nods morosely. “You get used to it.” He sighs.

George's court case has not gone well for him, either. A few weeks ago, he was convicted in adult court of participating in the home invasion robbery for which he had been arrested nearly a year earlier. The evidence against him, though suggesting he was more a helper than a leader, was nevertheless unequivocal on the issue of his involvement in a potentially deadly crime. He and three other people broke into someone's home. The adult leader had a gun. Seven innocent people, including children and an infant, were placed in jeopardy before one of the intended victims shot the ringleader, sending George and two other juveniles fleeing for their lives. Unable to do much to the two other kids because they were under sixteen, prosecutors piled charges on George as if to make up the difference: multiple counts of armed robbery, kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary. Jurors never heard about George's woeful background as a foster child entrusted by the state to addicts, or the Juvenile Court's long-standing failure to provide George a decent home or much-needed counseling. This was deemed irrelevant. To no one's surprise, the adult court jury who heard George Trevino's case convicted him after less than an hour of deliberation. He has been told that he could face a sentence of twenty-nine years to life in prison.

He has one chance, though. The adult court judge has the power to return George to the juvenile justice system, committing him to the California Youth Authority—giving him the “YA” number that all the HROs covet. This is the sentence Elias Elizondo longs for but cannot get under his plea bargain. George still has a shot at it, though, and if he could get it, he would be out in seven years, at age twenty-five. He would be treated the same as Ronald Duncan, except it would be because the system chose to do so, not because it was
forced
to do so.

The two most important factors in determining whether the judge does that are the opinions of the Probation Department (which made the initial recommendation to send him to the adult court in the first place) and the California Youth Authority itself, which will hold George for ninety days, submitting him to a battery of tests, counseling sessions, and evaluations to see if he is still a salvageable human being.

Janet is working to see that he gets that last chance, but George is not hopeful—“I expect the worst,” he says—and the process has gotten off to a poor start for him. When being interviewed by the probation officer charged with preparing a sentencing recommendation, George tried to show her his poems as an example of the positive work he has pursued in the hall. But the PO just tossed them aside, George tells Janet. The
interview went downhill from there. George returned to the hall sobbing, then refused to follow orders from the staff, which landed him in The Box. That, in turn, led to a black mark on his record, which could easily be used to justify sentencing him to adult prison rather than CYA.