No Matter How Loud I Shout (4 page)

“I wanted a beer,” he later said, when asked if he felt bad about hurting the woman. The question seemed to perplex him. “If you're strong enough to take something, why not take it?”

This was Richard's fifth arrest, but no weapons were used in the robbery, so the case was sent to the back of the line with the other “nonserious” felonies, and Richard walked free again, told to come back in four months.

The Juvenile Court could have revoked his probation at this point (or long before, given his abysmal record), locking him up for months or even years in county boot camps or the state-run Youth Authority juvenile prison system. His contempt for a system that had never held him
accountable was clear from the way he laughed in court when his latest victim's nose was mentioned. He flicked spitballs and threw gang signs in the courtroom when he thought no one was looking. His offenses had grown more bold and violent with each passing arrest. Yet, once more, the system turned him loose, as it had always done. And, finally, Richard graduated to the big time.

It happened two months after the beer robbery, before the overworked DA's juvenile operation had even waded through its backlog far enough to file formal assault charges. Two boys, David and Enrique, sat down in a small restaurant in the LA County city of Lynnwood to eat meat burritos and drink Cokes. A thin, short, Hispanic kid with a wispy mustache and a hand in his coat pocket materialized beside their table after a few minutes. The kid wore the uniform of the street: an oversized black hooded jacket, the baggy trousers hanging low, the underwear tops peeking out of the waistband. He had been milling around outside with members of the Young Crowd, muttering things like “traitor” and “nigger lover” because Enrique was Hispanic, while David was black—a pairing certain Latino street gang members find intolerable.

“Where are you
vatos
from?” the kid in the black jacket asked fifteen-year-old David. This is derogatory street code for “What gang are you in?” It is the standard question uttered before drive-by shootings and gang firefights on the street. It is a declaration of war.

“Nowhere,” David said, the only potentially neutral reply.

The skinny kid in the black jacket jutted his lower lip and turned slightly toward seventeen-year-old Enrique. “Where are
you
from?”

Enrique put his burrito down. “Nowhere,” he repeated.

Without another word, the kid pulled out a twenty-five-caliber handgun and fired three times, then ran out. One bullet slapped into the table a few inches from David. The other two slugs plowed into Enrique, who shouted, “I'm hit, I'm hit, go get my mom!” Blood spurted from his shoulder and chest. Forty minutes later, Enrique Diaz Nunez, an eleventh grader whose only crime had been eating a burrito with a friend, lay dead on a bloody emergency room gurney, his mother and sister weeping beside him.

A few days later, David drove with investigators past a crash pad kept by the Young Crowd. He pointed out a thin, short kid in an oversized black coat sauntering out the door. “That's him,” David hissed. “That's him.” They arrested Richard Perez on the spot and charged him with murder. He hadn't even bothered changing clothes.

At the police station after his arrest, detectives pulled out the inevitable Miranda card, explained to Richard his rights, and, hoping for a confession, asked if he had anything to say.

“Yeah, I have something to say,” the savvy street urchin said, well trained by his many encounters with the system. “I want my lawyer.”
²

Administrative Headquarters

Los Angeles County Probation Department

Downey, California

Though he had no way of knowing it, Richard's criminal career had been closely monitored for years, part of a massive project within Los Angeles County Juvenile Court designed to figure out what happens to kids after they enter the system—to actually track what a child does after committing a first offense. How many girls and boys never come back after one arrest? How many cross the line another time? How many go the way of Richard, committing crime after crime until someone dies and the system finally takes notice? As simple and crucial as these questions are—for they would reveal how well or how badly Juvenile Court performs its job—no one could answer them. They had never been asked before.

So, in 1990, researchers began watching first-offenders arrested in LA County in the first six months of that year, Richard among them—11,493 kids in all. Five men and women sat in a special secure room at probation headquarters and read file after confidential file, tracking every one of those kids—for three years. They did not intercede in any case, but merely watched, omnipotent and removed, part of a grand experiment that let each case spin out as it always had, even horror stories like Richard's.

By the end of 1993, the results of their painstaking work had become so appalling to the Probation Department and the Juvenile Court—and so profoundly threatening to the future of both bureaucracies—that officials have made no public announcement of the findings. But they boil down to this:

A little over half—57 percent—of kids who are arrested for the first time are never heard from again. They go straight, shocked by the system, mostly ordinary kids who make one mistake, and know it.

Of the rest, just over a quarter—27 percent, to be precise—get arrested one or two more times, then they, too, end their criminal careers. But the last 16 percent—that's sixteen kids out of every one hundred arrested—
commit a total of four or more crimes, ranging from theft to murder. They become chronic offenders. They become Richard Perez.

But as depressing as these figures are, they are nothing compared with the study's real gut punch, the part no one in the system wants to talk about: The researchers glumly concluded that Juvenile Court seemed irrelevant to how these kids turned out.

Out of those 11,493 kids, about a third had their cases dropped immediately after arrest. For a variety of reasons—insufficient evidence, reluctant witnesses, extenuating circumstances, pretrial diversion, even actual innocence now and again—these kids walked away without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom. The other two-thirds were prosecuted in Juvenile Court, where the vast majority went on to receive the benefits of probation, placement in a group home, or full-blown incarceration. And yet—here was the awful surprise—there was no difference between how these two groups of kids fared. Either way, Juvenile Court or no Juvenile Court, just over half never came back after their first bust, about a quarter committed one or two more crimes, and the rest went on a rampage.

In other words, doing nothing, and throwing everything the system has at kids, produced the same overall result.
³

As word of this stunning, humbling study slowly moved through Los Angeles Juvenile Court like a monsoon's leading edge, it became a rallying cry for two factions within the system: those who believe the days of a separate Juvenile Court should be numbered, and those who want large-scale reform without discarding the notion that children, simply by virtue of being children, deserve to be treated differently—even when they commit crimes. A third group—not to be underestimated, for it had long held the reins of power—wanted only to give into inertia, to ignore the study, to preserve a bureaucracy that could create without pang or blink both Gerry Gault and Richard Perez.

And so the year 1994 began with unaccustomed turmoil and uncertainty within the world's largest juvenile court, a place now no longer merely at war with its young charges, but also at war with itself.

Los Angeles County Superior Court

Juvenile Court Division

Thurgood Marshall Branch

Inglewood, California

T
HE
first thing you learn about this place,” Deputy District Attorney Peggy Beckstrand says as she conducts a brief tour of the battered juvenile courthouse she helps run, “is that nothing works.”

It is 8:25 in the morning, a cold winter day, the sky as gray as an old skillet, an intermittent, muffled roar occasionally filtering into the building from somewhere outside—the steady stream of fat, full jetliners on final approach to LAX one freeway exit to the south. Inside, the locks on the courtroom doors are snicking back, fresh piles of manila-covered court files are being placed on the judge's benches, lawyers are wading through the hundreds of kids and parents and witnesses gathered in the courthouse today, looking for a client they've never met, a witness they've never spoken to, a parent who can't believe his or her child is a criminal, evidence be damned. Dirty mint-green buses with metal cages inside them are lumbering toward court from LA's three enormous juvenile halls, carrying boys and girls wearing color-coded county-issue shirts and jeans, the color indicating their proclivity for violence or escape. The baddest kids sport coveralls in neon orange; their parents—those lucky enough to have a mom or dad interested enough to attend their court appearances—grip crumpled brown paper sacks with street clothes inside, hoping for an early release. In five minutes, court will be called into session, and the atmosphere
is charged with a sweaty, anxious expectation, as if the entire building were a crowded elevator stuck between floors.

“We're drowning,” Beckstrand flatly announces. She looks taller than her five feet six inches, due in part to her textbook posture. Exceedingly pale, with very long, very straight brown-blond hair, Beckstrand, a former Montessori teacher with a ribald sense of humor, enjoys a reputation for toughness that has left her decidedly unloved—and once sued—by her counterpart in the Public Defender's Office.
¹
“Look around,” she says of the chaos swirling in the hallways. “It just isn't working.”

She is not talking about the physical state of the place—the cracked and broken fixtures or the dysfunctional water coolers that dispense brackish water at body temperature—but of the juvenile system's broader failings, the constant aura of futility that leaves this career prosecutor regularly muttering about walking away from it all. She is not the only one. Many who work these halls have heard about the new study circulating through the system that shows, among other things, that the Juvenile Court squanders most of its time and energy, focusing on the kids who are beyond redemption while ignoring the children who could best be helped. “As if we needed a study to tell us the obvious,” she says. Throughout the bureaucracy, everyone is buzzing about this study, expecting—or fearing—that it will bring massive and fundamental reform to a place that has not changed in many positive ways since the 1960s, and shows it.
²

Beckstrand, for one, says she would welcome a shake-up, but she openly doubts the system's ability to break its tired patterns. Her voice sounds just as tired. “We're not rehabilitating these kids, and we're sure as hell not punishing them. They can get away with murder here, and they know it. The law-breakers are winning, and we—society, those of us who obey the rules—are losing.”

A young prosecutor she supervises grabs Beckstrand then, asking her to resolve one of the crises that erupt here hourly, and they disappear into a courtroom together. They pass without a glance a deputy public defender huddled on a bench with the mother of a mentally ill girl who has been charged with attempted murder after voices in her head instructed her to attack her sister with a machete. The mother is crying and shaking her head as the young lawyer explains why it will be difficult to keep the girl from being transferred to the harsh confines of adult court, due to the severity of the accusations against her and the fact that she is past sixteen years of age. “She really needs help and belongs here in Juvenile, and I'll do everything I can to make that happen,” the lawyer says. “But the problem
is, the law is very tough on cases like this. The best I can do today is try for a continuance. The district attorney holds all the cards.”

It is a peculiarity of Juvenile Court that two such contradictory conversations can occur here simultaneously and with total sincerity. This is because each side in the process—the prosecutors, the defenders, the judges, the cops and probation officers, the crime victims, the kids on trial here and their families—sees itself as being on the one and only losing side. When a case ends in Juvenile Court, it is often hard to tell just who has won.

The setting fuels this sense of futility: This courthouse is a grim place. The gray concrete box that is the Thurgood Marshall Branch of Los Angeles's massive Juvenile Court squats next to a once graceful garden district in the city of Inglewood, a community now so profoundly distressed that parents, policemen, and civic leaders meet monthly to plot safe routes through gang turf for their schoolchildren. The courthouse occupies the sort of neighborhood where members of warring black and Hispanic gangs summon one another by beeper and cellular phone to drive-by shootings and schoolyard race riots. Three blocks from Marshall Branch, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl sporting eleven prominent gang tattoos was caught distributing flyers advertising a gang-sponsored drug, sex, and beer party. The computer-generated flyers promised “Hoochies that ram free” can enter for free—meaning young girls who provide sex on demand need not worry about the five-dollar cover charge, a deal the eleven-year-old happily promoted to her sixth-grade schoolmates. When a counselor who seized the flyers asked the girl if she was worried about AIDS, she said no, it didn't matter. She'll be dead before she's twenty, anyway.

Yet, this is also the kind of neighborhood where wealthy Angelenos regularly park their BMWs and Mercedeses, because the Thurgood Marshall Branch, one of ten juvenile courthouses spanning the huge bowl of the Los Angeles Basin, serves more than just its own troubled surroundings. Juvenile offenders from LA's most upscale communities are hauled into the same courtrooms as well, from Beverly Hills to Hollywood to Malibu to Rancho Palos Verdes—the gangbangers' parents sitting next to the bankers and moguls with their designer briefcases and tasseled loafers, all equally dazed by the odd mixture of chaos, informality, and impenetrable ritual so unique to Juvenile Court. Through a fluke of geography and bureaucracy, in one of the most racially and economically segregated regions of America, the three grimy courtrooms of Marshall Branch Juvenile Court have become the last great melting pot. Here, everyone finds a new common ground: fear. Fear of our own children.