No Matter How Loud I Shout (58 page)

“You're trying to lead two lives, Carla, I know it,” Sharon tells her probationer during a visit to South Bay. “You've got all the confidence in the
world in yourself, but you underestimate other people, you always think you're one up on them, and I'm afraid you'll end up dead because of it. Dead or in jail—and the next time, it's gonna be as an adult.”

“No, I am through with it,” she assures Sharon. “I'm staying clean. I'm thinking of the future.” She gives her PO a gleaming smile. “You know me, Ms. Stegall.”

“Yes, I do, Carla.” Sharon sighs. “That's the problem. And maybe if we're lucky, that's the answer, too.”

At the end of an essay on the future, Carla wrapped up her plans with an unintended irony—one that speaks volumes about Juvenile Court and the kids who come through it, because the sentiment is so surprisingly common, even among the most hardened offenders: “Los Angeles is getting really crazy, so if it gets any worse, I will then move far away or just out of state. Where, it's undecided still.”

In person, she explains this sentiment in a more concrete way: “I don't want to die. Before, that didn't matter to me: I never thought about it. Now I do. If that means I've changed, I guess I have.”

Then she dashes out the door with an apology thrown over one shoulder. “I don't want to be late for work,” she calls, her footsteps receding down the hallway.

“I think by age fifteen there is a small number of kids who, for whatever deprivations they have suffered, are cooked, as my grandmother would have said. They are gone. Whatever you do is not going to make a difference. . . . I think the solution is to pare down the money we spend on those kids . . . [and] invest in the vast majority of kids who come from the same environment and are right on the cusp. . . . People will say, You are stigmatizing the bad kids. Well, if you have 36 kids in a classroom and four are throwing chairs at the teacher, you have to excise them. Otherwise, all will be lost. This is war.”

JUDGE JUDITH SHEINDLIN,
supervising judge, Manhattan Family Court, in the
New York Times
, December 30, 1994

Every 5 seconds of the school day, a student drops out.

Every 10 seconds a teenager becomes sexually active.

Every 26 seconds a baby is born to an unmarried mother.

Every 30 seconds a baby is born into poverty.

Every 59 seconds a baby is born to a teen mother.

Every 2 minutes a baby is born without prenatal care.

Every 4 minutes a child is arrested for a violent crime.

Every 7 minutes a child is arrested for a drug crime.

Every 2 hours a child is murdered.

Every 4 hours a child commits suicide.

CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND,
“A Child's Day”

12-13-94

Dear Sister Janet,

I hope when you receive this letter that it finds you in the best of health and in God's loving care. So how are you doing today? How is Ruth doing too? I hope you two are still touching hearts and putting smiles on the new minors' faces, just like you did to me when I was doing my time there. So how is Ed, is he still doing his writing classes there too?

Well, I'm doing fine up here in prison, very different from the other places I've been to since I've been locked up. But right now here in Wasco we are always on lock-down, it is very messed up here. There's really no program except for the one T.V. that's in the day room that we have to watch from our cells. But at least I won't be here long, I should leave any week . . . I saw my counselor already and he gave me my first eligible parole date, it is September the First, 2002. No later, no sooner.

I'm the youngest one here in Wasco. I'm only eighteen years old. Some of the guards here tell me: “Hey Kid, why don't you go back to CYA or Juvenile Hall, you're only eighteen.” I guess they think it's funny, but when they checked my background and found out I got busted when I was sixteen years old and done about two years in Central Juvenile Hall and got kicked out of CYA, then they stopped making smart remarks to me.

Well in this letter I'm sending you a poem about my loved ones that have passed away. Show it to Ed and the rest. If you want to, go ahead and make yourselves some copies. I love and miss you all, from Blinky Clanton.
¹

Love Always,

Elias Elizondo

It's Not All In My Mind

My outside may make you think that my heart is made of stone . . .

Is it my baggy pants, my tattoos and the sharp look that I own?

I look just like every Clanton cholo around,

standing on the neighborhood's corner tall and thin . . .

If I were to show you my true feelings,

this is where I would begin.

Abandoned by a father, raised by my mother . . .

Tios, Tias, primos, primas,
²

Familia always lying to each other.

Not much love would come from me . . .

Because if you take a good look, I'm hurting pretty badly.

I have stared down at my Abuelo
³
Alex's grave . . .

The flowers I've picked for him, I've saved.

Now I've buried my fourteen-year-old homeboy Payaso . . .

who took his last breath in my arms because of a cuetaso.
⁴

My heart has screamed nothing but pain and agony . . .

Why did God take away my newborn primo, Baby Stevie?

One second I'm strolling with my homie Looney down the street . . .

The next second I hear bang, bang, bang only to find myself kneeling by him,

without his heartbeat.

I've missed three funerals since my incarceration, both of my abuelitas
⁵
and one childhood friend . . .

Natural causes will always be here, but all this murder must end!!

We all know that our loved ones will come and go . . .

Oh Lord Jesus, please don't take any more until I parole.

Elias Elizondo, Wasco State Prison, December 13, 1994

15 Years to Life, Torcido:
⁶
1992-93-94-??

J
UDGE
Roosevelt Dorn's bench is, as usual, piled high with files this morning, another crammed docket, another typical day in a Los Angeles Juvenile Court that has lost ground in the year since Dorn took back his bench at Thurgood Marshall. With the fervor of a minister, he regularly pronounces the Juvenile Court he loves under siege and on the verge of extinction, exhorting the disaffected professionals who work there to give more of themselves, to make a difference, to resist the unraveling of this place. He continually pleads with lawmakers to lift the shroud of confidentiality from his court, so the public can see beyond the well-publicized failures of the system and glimpse how juvenile justice can work—and why it is in need of rebuilding, not demolition.

His pleas, so far, have been in vain, and so he does what he can, jamming more and more files onto his docket and those of the other two Inglewood courtrooms, an almost frenzied effort to help as many kids as he can, as fast as he can. As long as he can.

The files themselves, piled so high on his bench and his clerk's desk, make for an interesting and revealing study—not their contents, but their actual physical size, shape, and weight. As telling a trend as any visible in Juvenile Court can be discerned from such simple observation. Some of the dog-eared manila folders are barely the width of an Oreo creme filling.
Others are so thick that if tossed onto a desktop, they would land with the same heavy, hollow thud of a Sunday paper hitting a concrete porch. The thickness of a file is crucial, the single most revealing thing about any Juvenile Court case because, unlike adult court, where each new crime generates a new file, juveniles get one folder for life, with each new offense piled in with the others. It's as if you kept the same report card from your first day of kindergarten through your last day of high school—your entire institutional life, all in one place.

One quick look at a file, even a brief heft without benefit of a glance inside, speaks volumes to an experienced judge or prosecutor or defender. Dorn can tell down to the fraction of an inch what the probable ending to a case will be, without ever having to read the contents. When a file is a sixteenth of an inch, it will almost certainly end in probation. A quarter to a half inch, add some time in the hall, maybe move the kid to a group home after release. An inch or so in thickness, and the likely sentence is one of the county's two dozen juvenile camps. And over two inches, the kid is probably a Sixteen Percenter, allowed too many bites of the apple, and now headed to the Youth Authority.

In the past year, the files have gotten thicker. More kids have been allowed to commit more offenses, and the time lag between arrest and a first appearance in court has blossomed, sometimes as long as eight or nine months, an effect so far removed from the cause that, to kids, the Juvenile Court appears to have no power at all. At the same time, the options available for dealing with juvenile offenders when they finally do appear in court have shriveled, thanks to harsh new laws and even harsher budget cuts.

Judge Dorn calls his calendar, the voice just as booming and rich as ever, gentle persuader soaked in molasses one moment, strident and intimidating the next, his biting words shaking insolence from young criminals—and torpor from disinterested attorneys—as if he were shaking dust from a rug. He hefts a thick file, then glances over his glasses at the defense table. A sixteen-year-old charged with burglary and auto theft—committed while he was on probation for cocaine sales and assault with a deadly weapon—has been escorted in for disposition. The judge looks the boy over, rifles the file one more time, then makes a snap decision to disregard a Probation Department recommendation that he go to the California Youth Authority prison system. Dorn chooses a far milder sentence of long-term probation camp instead—despite the boy's failure to be reformed by two previous camp sentences from other judges. It is a common
Dorn tactic, one that irks prosecutors without necessarily endearing him to defenders—kids get one across-the-board break the first time he sees them because, as he so often notes, being on probation to Judge Dorn is a whole new experience.

“You've received your break. Everyone gets one break in Judge Dorn's courtroom,” he tells the boy, glancing at a report that shows the kid has led a double life as an inner-city gang member nicknamed “Lefty,” while staying in school and earning good grades. “Now it's up to you. . . . You've been exceptionally lucky—lucky you haven't been killed with the kind of life you've been living. How many of your friends have you seen get killed?”

“A lot,” Lefty answers truthfully. The two simple words, announced without sorrow or pity, say much about Lefty: He has witnessed so many kids in his neighborhood killed in drive-bys and jackings that he has come to see violent, premature ends as the natural way of things. Dorn knows this, and sees in it a reason for mercy, a child he might save. Others see only a hardened, calloused indifference to life, something to fear and lock away. Today, in this courtroom at least, it is Judge Dorn's vision that will prevail.

“A lot,” Dorn repeats quietly. “Do you want to die in the streets?”

The kid has to think about it a second—not that he wants to die, but that it never occurred to him that he might have a choice in the matter. Hesitantly, Lefty says, “No.”

“Then things have got to change.”

The boy nods and agrees—though whether Dorn has planted a seed of hope in this kid, or if Lefty is merely telling the judge what he wants to hear, will not be known for months or years, if ever. Either he will leave camp and never appear in Juvenile Court again, or he will commit yet another crime, with only prison ahead of him, all other options exhausted. In the first scenario, sending him to camp will prove to be the best thing that ever happened to Lefty. But if he commits another, worse crime, he may find himself headed not to CYA, but to adult court and adult prison, in which case Dorn's decision will become Lefty's—and his next victim's—worst nightmare, mercy converted to curse. It is a gamble. Juvenile Court is always a gamble. Dorn is betting Lefty can be saved. He'd rather lose that wager, he says, than bet the other way, and never know if he could have turned the kid around. “That's what Juvenile Court is all about,” he says. “These are our children. They deserve every chance we can give them.”

“Yeah, well, it's not because he wants to be nice, or even because it's the best thing for this kid,” whispers a deputy public defender sitting in the courtroom. “Dorn just likes to keep them all under his thumb. He can't do that with a kid in CYA, but he can with camp.” This aside is intended as a criticism, but the truth is, Dorn heartily agrees with this assessment. Later on, he even laughs about it. “Better my thumb than prison, I daresay.”

As usual, there is no time to agonize over any of this while court is in session. With a shuffle of papers and a scurrying of lawyers, before Lefty and the bailiff even make it through the back door to the holding tank, the roll call resumes. A fifteen-year-old girl with a teardrop tattooed in the corner of her left eye hears her name called out, stands, and says, “Here.” She is at least six months pregnant, a huge, low belly on a tiny frame. She is charged with theft. The unmarried mother who bore her at age sixteen sits nearby in very tight black acid-washed jeans and jacket, the faded blue ink of crude gang tattoos still visible on her fingers and wrist, those three dots that signify “my crazy life,” the gangster's shorthand for
I don't care if I live or die, so why should I give a shit about you?
This is the family he has to work with. Dorn sighs and rubs his eyes, and begins the process anew, looking for a way and a reason to save a lost child.