No Matter How Loud I Shout (57 page)

It is an essentially meaningless argument, and Scarlett looks bewildered at it. “What does it matter?” he asks. “He's out at age twenty-five anyway.”

“I just don't think they should be concurrent,” Peggy argues, ignoring the low mutters from Ronald's mother. “It is absurd. To give the message to this minor that one of the lives he took doesn't matter—it's wrong.”

Scarlett tries to reason with her, explaining again that, as a practical matter, there is no difference. A juvenile life sentence, or two of them, still means he will go home at age twenty-five. But Peggy continues to protest. Scarlett finally waves her off, saying the sentences will be concurrent, twenty-five years to life, plus five years enhancement for the use of a gun, a total of thirty years to life.

Peggy still won't let it go. “The People object,” she says, standing up, her face red. Ronald is sitting and smirking, shaking his head. Defense Attorney Cooper says nothing, content, knowing it won't matter what Peggy says or what Scarlett does. Peggy plows on. “To the victims' family, this matters a great deal. The law has given us nothing to handle this case properly, but I just don't want to send the message that one of these people's lives doesn't matter.”

“I agree with you. I agree with you,” Scarlett says wearily. “This is one of the few states in the country that allows someone to commit murder and go to prison only until age twenty-five. But I'm not going to change that here, and neither are you. That's it.”

And with that, the hearing is over. Ronald has been disposed of. He has
nothing to say to the court, no statement or plea—even though at the conclusion of his trial, Cooper had promised all sorts of revelations. Ronald supposedly wanted to tell the whole story. Now, though, he is content to just sit in amused silence.

As Scarlett rises to leave the courtroom, Ronald's father jabs a gnarled finger in Peggy's direction and says bitterly, “They went after the small fry, and let the adult instigator get away. It's not right.”

Ronald's parents still believe in their son's innocence, even after he admitted being part of the plan to rob his employers. “When he spoke of planning the attack,” they told the probation officer on the case, “he was just playing because he was upset. He loved his bosses.”

Cooper overhears Ronald's father make a similar statement as they leave the courtroom. The defense lawyer shakes his head and steps out in the hallway with Peggy. “I explained to them that what Ronald has admitted to is the same as if he pulled the trigger under the law, but they won't accept that. They can't accept it.”

“Neither does Ronald,” Peggy says bitterly. “After all this, after a year of fighting, after the trial and all this expense, to achieve a result we knew was coming, and what do we learn at the end? That you can kill one person, two, it doesn't matter. The result is the same. Out at age twenty-five.”

Actually, Cooper corrects her mildly, it's possible he'll get out at age twenty-three. That's when he's entitled to his first parole hearing. Just about six years from now.

Peggy just stares at him, trying not to shiver.

·  ·  ·

The South Bay Community Day Center is housed in the former Jonas Salk Elementary School, a long-abandoned LA County school building designed for no known reason to resemble a brick-and-concrete Stone-henge—a bizarre semicircular grouping of sagging classrooms whose metal doors open up onto a barren concrete patio outdoors, cracked and uninviting. In recent years, this dilapidated complex, unwanted and unloved, was converted into the South Bay CDC—a court school for delinquents on probation who have just left detention, camp, or the Youth Authority, and who have been cast out by regular schools.

Unlike the bright and cheery Rosewood School, with its computers, its dedicated teachers, and its program that puts delinquents to work helping disabled children, South Bay is nothing more than an excuse to keep kids off the street for a few hours each day. It consists of two classrooms, two teachers, a secretary, a couple of administrators, and twenty-seven kids,
several of them eager students, with the other twenty or so intent on learning nothing more than how many times they can ask permission to use the bathroom in a single day without the teacher catching on.

Today is a typical day at South Bay. Seven kids are home on suspension for fighting. Two boys are sleeping, heads down on the six-foot-long tables that serve as communal desks here, their books unopened beside them. Tattoos and oversized baggies are in plentiful evidence among the student body, though all are on probation and barred from wearing gang-style attire, a violation of school rules and conditions of probation no one cares to enforce. It is not even a close thing—one thirteen-year-old baby face is wearing clothes that would swim on George Foreman, though no one calls him on it. On the wall, the following class schedule is posted:

10:00–10:30, class

10:30–11:00, physical education

11:00–11:30, lunch

11:30–1:30, movie

Videotaped movies—today's is
Malcolm X
—provide one of the few ways to engage the whole class in some kind of discussion, the teacher explains, though even that result is usually desultory at best.

“All they want to do is pass time, then go out and bang.” The teacher sighs, ignoring the blank stares, the doodling, the snoozing children in her classroom. She has the exhausted look of someone who works the graveyard shift at a factory, though with less job satisfaction. “Do I think I'm really making a difference here?” she says. “No, not really.”

South Bay CDC is Carla James's new school. The former honors student turned Tepa-13 gangbanger turned drive-by shooter and convicted juvenile felon has graduated from eight months in the counseling program at the Dorothy Kirby Center, and is back on the street, Home on Probation. She needs only a few more credits to receive her high school diploma, but only South Bay CDC will take her. It is a depressing place, more warehouse than school, but Carla doesn't seem to care.

“It doesn't matter to me,” she says with her usual breezy diffidence. “I know where I'm headed, and that's all that counts. I'm on a new path.”

Carla has come a long way, it seems. She is as personable and charismatic as ever, but gone is the tomboy dress and gangbanger attitude, replaced by casual clothes, styled hair, even a little makeup and nail polish, things the old Carla viewed with disdain. She is holding down a job, doing
well in school, staying out of trouble. She swears she is no longer “kicking it” with her homeboys.

Her counselor at Dorothy Kirby, Mr. Shabazz, has pronounced Carla a rousing success for the juvenile justice system, writing a glowing report on her progress to Commissioner Polinsky, who then said it would be his pleasure to release Carla to go home.

She's been turned totally around, Shabazz crows after Carla departs his program. And the secret was pushing her into seeing herself and her actions clearly, forcing Carla to take responsibility for what she has done. Long and repeated counseling sessions with her mother brought the source of Carla's angry rebellion to the surface, Shabazz says—anger at her father's death, at her mother's remarriage, at the attention lavished on her younger brothers, at her mother's assumption that Carla could always take care of herself. Carla and her mother began to understand one another again, Shabazz says, and to see why she had deliberately gotten into so much trouble over the years. More importantly, Carla started to see she could break the old patterns, and be happier at the same time.

“Carla managed to make the transition she had to make, away from the gang lifestyle. With her it used to be, my barrio, my barrio, my barrio, like a mantra, it was all she lived for, and she was ready to kill or die for it,” Shabazz says. “And it's true, once you are in a gang, you're in it for life, you can never fully leave it behind. But you can choose not to participate. You can choose to pursue other life goals, and that can be recognized and respected. You can make it clear that you still hold an allegiance to your neighborhood, that you know where you came from, but that you are moving on. She has done all that. She is not doing any of the activities that got her in trouble. She is staying home, going to school. She is going to make it. I have no doubt.”

But despite Shabazz's optimism, once she is out of Kirby and back on the street, the transition is not so easy to maintain. To make it in a gang, to be a leader like Carla and to command respect, requires a strong-willed personality, particularly for a girl moving up in the macho hierarchy of street gangs. That willpower served Carla well at Dorothy Kirby, but it has its drawbacks on the street. She remains a natural leader, and the teenaged delinquent boys at South Bay follow her around like an entourage, part of it the attraction all boys have for a pretty girl, but part of it because she is Carla James, a heavy from Tepa-13, a former “shot-caller”—the name given to a gang's boss, a term both figurative and literal. And the old ways die hard: She has just been suspended from school for three days for yelling
out her gang's name during a tense moment in class, provoking a fight among rival gang members.

Carla returns to school contrite after her three days off, determined, she says, to stay out of trouble—even as the gangbangers in her class moon over her and follow her around, hanging on her words. She says that they're not discussing anything bad, that she tells them what she has learned herself: that you don't have to fight or shoot in order to have respect. “That's all it takes to lead a normal life,” she says. “That's all it takes to make me just like anybody else, realizing that simple little thing.”

It's always hard to tell with Carla. She's so bright and personable and eager to please, her eyes steady when she says she has changed. But the fact is, these are the words the system wants to hear, and Carla knows this as well as anyone. Indeed, she candidly admits that, throughout her years in Juvenile Court, and even at Dorothy Kirby, she has always told people what they wanted to hear. She has always promised to change, to go straight, ever since she first got in trouble four years earlier. She has promised repeatedly to have her gang tattoos removed, but the giant Tepa-13 is still emblazoned across her belly, and the three dots on her right knuckles, signifying
mi vida loca
, my crazy life, are still in place.

“It's just so easy to get over on people,” she explains. “At Kirby, I had it good with the staff, with the supervisor, with the director—they trusted me, and I could do whatever I wanted and never get in trouble. It's like I ran the place. If there was a problem with the other kids, I took care of it, I kept everyone in line, the girls and the guys. Some knucklehead would try to talk shit, I'd go in and take care of it. I made life easier for the staff.”

She is on a break between classes, holed up in a small conference room, talking easily about why she graduated with honors from the Kirby Center. “I showed them a side of me that's like a normal person, which is what they wanted to see. It's like, I played by the rules, not because anyone had changed me, but because that was the smart thing to do in the situation. But I was always the same person. Locking you up, even at a place like Kirby, doesn't help you change. It makes you worse. If I changed, I did it because I wanted to, not because some program made me change.”

Even so, Carla says, there have been changes in her life. Things are different now, and that's not just her saying what she knows people want to hear. The counseling sessions with her mother really helped, as did the group meetings with the other kids at Kirby. A lot of it was just growing up, she says. Hanging out, fighting, shooting, drinking—the same repetitious gang life—is less attractive to a girl about to turn eighteen than it was
when she was fourteen and did her first drive-by. “Before, I'd do anything, I didn't care. I'd do shootings, drive-bys, I was doing so much work, my name was going up, if I had killed someone, I just wouldn't have cared. Now, I don't kick it anymore. I'm not into that. Let the youngsters do that, the next generation coming up. That's not me anymore. It's boring to me now. Look, I know what's going to happen. It's Friday night, and it'll be like every other. Hanging out, drinking, somebody will get in a fight, then somebody will start shooting. You get tired of the same old after a while, you know?”

It sounds so simple, but many of Carla's friends never grow bored with living on the edge of dying. They remain predators, destined for early deaths or lives spent in and out of prison, wilder, even, than the younger Carla. Once, she might have been willing to attack and even kill an enemy of her gang, but she never considered robbing a stranger, or sticking up a bank, or attempting a carjacking—to her, such crimes would have been immoral. The willingness of newer, younger gang members to commit such crimes has turned her off of gangbanging, she says. The new generation is too crazy even for her.

So now Carla is a month away from high school graduation. She has a job working in a shopping mall, wearing a silly hat and selling hot dogs on sticks. In addition to South Bay, she goes three days a week to a community college, and will start full-time after she gets her diploma. She's thinking about majoring in sociology, corrections, firefighting, or orthodontics (“I like to try different things,” she says). She is living at home with her mother and, six months out of Dorothy Kirby, has had no problems other than the one suspension. Her old probation officer, Sharon Stegall, is back on her case, added incentive for Carla to stay straight.

As her eighteenth birthday approaches, odds are she will never be charged as a juvenile again, whether she stays straight or not. A Juvenile Court success: She's a kid who won't be back. Still, Carla's probation officer fears that, despite the girl's newfound maturity and restraint, she could be sucked back into her old life at any time. Sharon Stegall wants to believe Carla will make it and that Mr. Shabazz is right; she also knows Carla still sees her old gangbanger friends and still flirts with being a shot-caller, unwilling to give up the power and respect she has earned on the street. Carla hasn't completely removed herself from her old life, and being partway in is even more dangerous than doing it all the way.