No Matter How Loud I Shout

A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

At a time when an epidemic of violence has left America afraid for — and afraid of — its children, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes pierces the secrecy and scandal shrouding the one place designed to save kids, though it seldom does: juvenile court. NO MATTER HOW LOUD I SHOUT is a poignant look at a year in the life of Los Angeles Juvenile Court — and a vivid portrait of the children who pass through it.

Rigid secrecy has always kept juvenile justice hidden from public view, but Humes gained unprecedented access to the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, the nation’s largest, spending a year with judges, probation officers, lawyers, and the kids themselves, as a volunteer teacher to the most hardened offenders in Juvenile Hall.

Humes focuses on five children passing through the forlorn halls of the L.A. Juvenile Court, and their stories are by turns infuriating, frightening and uplifting: the fifteen- year-old killer the system can’t punish; a boy facing life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit; the abused child imprisoned instead of helped; the honor student who does drive-by shootings; the gangbanger who finds redemption in the eyes of a retarded girl.

Combining the drama of narrative non-fiction with the revelations of investigative reporting, this is a moving story of personal heroism and a damning indictment of a system in chaos.

“Passionate... A sad, maddening, brilliant book.”

— The Washington Post

“A finely etched, powerfully upsetting portrait.”

— New York Times

“The book reads like a pilot for a Michael Crichton TV series... Stories careen by in an ‘ER’-style blur but still manage to touch a nerve... Humes has produced a thoughtful, nuanced work, set apart from the flood of wonkish policy books by his often beautiful prose.”

— Washington Monthly

“A heartbreaking tale of justice for the youngest members of society... This was investigative storytelling at its best... in the muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair.”

— Investigative Reporters and Editors

“Told with the drama and beauty of a novel... Humes succeeds where many would have failed because he is working out of the best American tradition of nonfiction narrative, of literary journalism, by paying homage to practitioners of the craft such as John McPhee, Joan Didion, Richard Rhodes and Tom Wolfe.”

— Los Angeles Times

“This book should be required reading not just for everyone working in the juvenile justice system, but for anyone who honestly cares about our children’s future and our own.”

— Paul Mones, Stalking Justice

Humes offers a harrowing but mesmerizing glimpse of our future. Using taut prose and a wealth of ugly, even comic, detail, Humes... starkly etches an overburdened system, which, by prosecuting only the worst crimes, is virtually handing out free passes to young truants and vandals until they develop into armed robbers or murderers.”

— Elle Magazine

“Edward Humes has the sympathetic heart of a novelist and the cool, clear eye of a veteran newspaperman. NO MATTER HOW LOUD I SHOUT takes a gut-wrenching look at today's Dickensian juvenile court system, a world filled with frustrated judges, burnt-out lawyers, terrified parents, the troubled teens themselves, and unsung heroes who managed to do the impossible almost every day of the week. I don’t know how Humes won the trust of the kids whose stories are at the heart of this unforgettable book — but he did — and they told him everything. As rich with incident and character as the finest fiction, this is journalism at its passionate best.”

— Mark Horowitz, Los Angeles Magazine

“Edward Humes guides the reader through the labyrinth of the juvenile justice system with a master’s skill. For anyone who claims a stake in the future, this is a necessary read.”

— Leon Bing, Smoked and Do or Die

“A convincingly reported, profoundly disturbing discussion of the Los Angeles juvenile court’s multifarious failings, providing terrifying evidence of the under-budgeted system's inability to slow the explosion of juvenile crime or to make even a reasonable stab at rehabilitating troubled offenders. Pulitzer- Prize-winning journalist Humes... draws an alarming portrait of a judicial system in disarray. Must reading for law- and-order advocates as well as for those bleeding hearts whose worst suspicions will be confirmed here.

— Kirkus Reviews

Prologue from “No Matter How Loud I Shout”

Intake

Except when earthquakes have rendered it unsafe for human habitation — temporarily, inmates are told — new arrivals at Central lockup are brought to the Old Wing. With its high walls of smog-blackened stone and filmy windows barred with flat, rust-colored strips of iron, the structure is ancient by Los Angeles standards, which is to say, it has been standing since before World War II. Its stone-block facade rears up unexpectedly, a grimy fortress in an otherwise desolate flatland of single-story industrial buildings, lumpy railroad crossings and darkened, windowless warehouses stacked near a sprawling county hospital. Even hardened criminals gasp when they first see Central’s medieval profile rising before them from the urban plain. The most observant of them, however, can take heart at their continued, valued place in society and commerce: A lone billboard overlooks the street leading to the lockup, a depiction of a man in a crown and royal red robes, flanked by a six-foot tall pocket-paging device and a young woman squeezed into a transistor-sized red bikini. The man is the “King of Beepers,” and his product is especially popular with the hundreds of drug dealers, gangbangers and assorted other criminals who pass by his shrewdly placed advertisement in shackles each day, for whom beepers are both status symbols and necessary tools of the trade in this information age.

Past the billboard, at the terminus of Alcazar Street, there is a guard shack overlooking Central’s drive-in entrance, but it is unmanned at night and the lot is poorly lit, the sort of place where everyone feels the need to hurry to their cars, locking the doors as soon as they get inside. At the end of this narrow and crowded parking lot, where the spots reserved for visitors are kept full by county employees, a towering brown metal door, big enough to admit a row of three semi-trailers, creaks inward on oiless hinges every few minutes. Police cars and sheriff’s vans pass in and out of this immense portal in a constant stream, making their night deposits, leaving behind people charged with every sort of crime imaginable, from shoplifters and drunks to carjackers and killers, linked together without distinction in long rumba lines by those great equalizers, belly chains and handcuffs.

Newcomers arrive at Central mostly at night, emerging from squad cars and police vans to be herded inside the Old Wing, with its smeary walls and cracked linoleum floors, their nostrils assaulted by the universal jail-house scent, a rat-warren smell of urine and sweat masked by some sickly sweat cleaning agent vaguely reminiscent of pink bubble gum. There is a constant electronic buzzing in the air — an old airport metal detector that the lockup staff and visitors must pass through. Its alarm sounds nearly continuously, a piercing bleat no one monitors nor heeds, notwithstanding the armed escape at the lockup a few months earlier.

Flyspecked fluorescents buzz and flicker overhead, making the newcomers blink and squint as they walk in from the darkness. To some of the new arrivals, these surroundings are well known, bespeaking home, even comfort — as familiar as the aromas of morning coffee and frying bacon are to more fortunate folk. Others have never been in such a place, never saw it, smelled it, imagined it. Their eyes are wide with the ancient instinct to stampede.

The new arrivals are escorted one by one to a small room, where the Intake Officer conducts a brief interview, reviews the police reports, talks to the suspects' next of kin if they’re around, then writes a two-page report with recommendations. Some of the intake officers have perfected a technique of quizzing newcomers that rarely, if ever, requires them to utter a complete sentence. They simply say, “Name? Date of birth? Address?” all the way down the form in front of them, like reading a shopping list, a complete interview done and only a few dozens words uttered in the process. This peremptory method belies the immense power the Intake Officer wields as a kind of pretrial judge, jury and jailer rolled into one. He can recommend release or incarceration, prosecution or diversion, even dismissal of charges, and his calls carry great weight with the court. The recommendations tend to get more liberal as the lockup reaches its capacity each night — “You can only make so many of ’em sleep on mattresses on the floor before the ACLU shows up,” the Intake Officer on duty this night confides to a cop escorting one of the newcomers.

The Intake Officer has already processed twenty-seven cases in a little over four hours — all manner of thieves, burglars and gun-toting criminals, several probation violators, two carjackers, an arsonist, an armed robber and a drive-by shooter. The Intake Officer was used to routine and rote, to offenders who fit the classic stereotypes, but of late the patterns had been changing, not so much because of the mix of crimes — that had remained pretty typical — but because of the type of people committing them. In recent days he had referred for prosecution a stick-up suspect who was rich, with a home in one of L.A.’s most affluent neighborhoods and no need beyond sheer kicks for robbing anyone; a drive-by shooter who was female — still an oddity, even in an age of unprecedented violent crime; and a home invasion robber with one of the hardest-luck stories the Intake Officer had ever heard, having been raised by that ultimate dysfunctional parent, the state, only to be abandoned to a life of crime.

Tonight he has an even more unusual newcomer, this one charged with murder — though that is not the strange part. Used to be murder cases were momentous exceptions to the plodding dullness of his job, but now they, too, had become fairly routine. Dozens a month now. The “pop sheet” at the lockup is full of them. It is the circumstances of the case — and its probable outcome — that jump out at you. It is nothing short of bizarre.

The case involves a botched robbery at a freeway motel. Two armed suspects demanded money from the desk clerk, but another motel employee emerged from a back room with a gun of his own, blowing a fatal two-inch hole into the ringleader’s chest. No one else was hurt. Still, the surviving robber — Geri Vance, who now stands before the Intake Officer — was arrested for murder in the death of his crime partner, the theory being that no one would have died had the robbery never taken place. It was a legal loophole in reverse, a murder charge for someone who had killed no one. The Intake Officer has heard of such cases, but has never actually seen one before.

“How can they charge me with murder? I never even fired my gun at anyone,” Geri tells the Intake Officer, which is perfectly true — and, legally at least, completely irrelevant. “I was forced to take part in that robbery. I didn’t want to do it, but I gave in. I know I have to do some time for that, I understand that. But I’m no killer.”

There is an earnestness in Geri’s manner and words that even the jaded Intake Officer can see. He almost feels sorry for the guy. “You’ll have your day in court,” the Intake Officer offers. Geri only winces.

Geri’s case is in stark contrast to another murder case that passed through the intake office in recent weeks, a very ugly double homicide in which the suspect had already confessed to police that he killed his employers, a middle-aged married couple who owned a popular neighborhood ice cream shop in the View Park section of Los Angeles. Although they had long treated their counterman like a member of the family, the shop owners had recently chastised Ronald Duncan for chronically coming late to the shop. This so irritated Ronald that he decided to rob them, then blow their heads off with a shotgun while they drove him home from work. He boasted about it to a friend the next day, which was his downfall, as it is with so many other criminals who would not otherwise be caught. The arresting officers in this case had handed him over at Central with obvious relief, as if he were diseased.

In both murder cases, the Intake Officer had to look through the thick rubber-banded packets of paper compiled by the police on each killing. The two suspects couldn’t be more different. It seems clear that Geri the motel robber wasn’t a killer at heart. The only reason he had been caught was because he brought his dying crime partner to a hospital emergency room after fleeing the Best Western they tried to rob. He could have gotten away clean, but chose not to. Then he had pretty much told the truth from the moment the police grabbed him at the hospital, immediately admitting to the robbery — not realizing he had signed his own murder warrant by doing so, his protests of coercion notwithstanding. He is bright and personable, with a sad history that began when he was abused and neglected as a child, left to roam the streets and to accumulate a record of minor crimes, none of them violent, at least until today. His fate had been sadly predictable, almost preordained, the Intake Officer figures.

But this other one, this shotgun-wielding killer, had come out of nowhere. Ronald Duncan had no criminal record, no known history of violence or abuse, no mental illness — just an unremarkable middle-class background, plodding and dull. He had tried to cook up a bogus alibi once the police caught up with him, then finally confessed after a marathon session with detectives, without any apparent pangs of conscience or remorse. Once his initial fear at the unfamiliarity of the lockup faded, the Intake Officer saw a grin on Ronald’s face, as if he had been brought to Central on a traffic offense, not a murder. He wondered aloud how much respect on the streets he’d earn for getting busted on such a serious rap. But when he’s asked why he killed his employers, Ronald adamantly denied it — notwithstanding the police tape recording of him admitting to murder. Then he had the gall to ask, “Can I go home now?”

Both of these newcomers ended up on the same unit, the lockup’s High Risk Offender wing, joining the other murderers, rapists and assorted other violent criminals awaiting trials or sentencing, stripped, searched, showered and given orange jumpsuits to wear, their clothes and possessions boxed and tagged. After months, a year, possibly more, their cases will be resolved. The Intake Officer has no doubt which of the two murder defendants the system will end up treating most harshly.

Geri Vance, the would-be motel robber — the murder defendant who killed no one — faces life in prison without possibility of parole, and will almost certainly get it.

Ronald Duncan, the shotgun killer, can serve no more than eight years, and probably will do less. He can never see the inside of a state penitentiary. After his release, his record will be wiped clean, as if it never existed, the files sealed by state law, so that he can move freely, run for office, own a gun.

Even a man made cynical from running the intake desk too many nights has to marvel at this. But the Intake Officer doesn’t dwell on such matters very long, nor does he try to manipulate some other result by injecting opinion into his reports. He gave up long ago trying to find sense in the workings of Juvenile Court.

There is just too much else to deal with — things were backing up in the Old Wing. Let some overworked juvenile judge worry about the rights and wrongs of it all. The Intake Officer still had to deal with two young car thieves, a twelve-year-old child molester, an assortment of warring gangbangers, and a straight-A student who tried to hack her sister to death with a machete. There were papers to fill out and cells to fill up: It was a busy night behind the high stone walls of Los Angeles' Central Juvenile Hall.

Like always.

---

Elias is reading to my class, his dark eyes fixed on the paper quivering in his hands.

These are the things I learned when I was growing up:
I learned how to take a spray can of paint
and write my nombre on the wall.
I learned how to make a Walkman’s motor into a tattoo machine,
so that I could get my barrio on my arms and my neck,
to show how much I love my homeboys.
I learned how to sell the weed and the rock.
These are the things I learned when I was growing up.

The seven other boys in the class nod as Elias reads. They are fourteen and fifteen and sixteen years old, and he is describing their lives as well his own, lives that brought them to Central Juvenile Hall not as mere delinquents, like most of the 1,600 kids warehoused here, but as HROs — high-risk offenders. Geri Vance is in my class, and Ronald Duncan, part of a broad assortment of kids, some with futures, some without, most of them painfully aware which category they fall into. “We’re the monsters they talk about on the news,” sixteen-year-old Chris, a gentle-mannered robber of pizza deliverymen, told me matter-of-factly when I first started teaching the Monday night writing class two months ago. “We’re the ones you’re supposed to be afraid of.” I felt too guilty to tell him that I had, indeed,expected to find monsters when Sister Janet first led me to them. Hesitating outside the double-locked steel door to their unit, I had asked the juvenile hall chaplain rather nervously why she had chosen these kids, rather than some less hardened, more salvageable boys or girls, and Janet had just smiled cryptically and said, “Because these boys need you more.”

Elias has a stoic strength about him, quiet and shy, in the past too nervous to read his work aloud. At first, he always just folded his eloquent essays on life in the streets into tiny squares of paper, passing them to me in silence so I could read them privately. Tonight, though, his anger has boiled up from the page and into the class.

When I was growing up, I learned how to take
another person’s car without a key,
how to drive it and sell it, or just leave it somewhere.
I learned how to sit down low
and look out the windows for the enemy,
to see them before they saw me.
And, finally, when I was growing up,
I learned how to load bullets into a gun.
I learned how to carry it and aim it,
and I learned how to shoot at the enemy,
to be there for my homeboys, no matter what.

“I hear you,” James says, an obvious longing for the street in his voice. He has just penned an essay on how he’d like to drive a car over his ex-girlfriend, and it is not entirely clear that he is joking. The kids, in their severe jail-house haircuts and the neon orange jump suits reserved for HROs, look pale and fragile beneath the hall’s harsh lights, a few of them nursing adolescent wisps of mustache hair that only make them look younger. Yet most of the boys in this room are on trial for thoroughly adult crimes — murder or attempted murder or armed robbery. They have witnessed and done terrible things. At the same time, these kids who could pull a trigger without a blink remain painfully timid about reading their work aloud, blushing, breathing hard, breaking a sweat just at the thought of standing before the class and baring themselves. Silence can claim the room like an advancing tide. Tonight, though, Elias, with his angry diatribe, is my unexpected hero. He has broken the ice. And then this seemingly hardened gangbanger, this kid with the huge tattoo on his arm announcing his gang allegiance, Sureno 13, surprises everyone. His voice drops nearly to a whisper, hoarse and urgent, his words taking a new direction.

These are the things I learned when I was growing up.
But this is what I want to know:
I want to know, who is going to teach me
how to pick out the right baby carriage for my little girl?
Who is going to teach me how to make up a bottle,
or to change a diaper, or to buy baby food?
Who is going to teach me how to be a father?
How to take care of my family?
How to live a life — a normal life?
These are the things I never learned growing up.
Who will teach me now?

When he finishes, the room is silent, not a cough, not a mutter, not a rustle of clothing, just the sound of Elias setting his paper down on the old Formica tabletop and, filtered through the room’s walls of metal, cinder block and safety glass with wire mesh embedded within, the muffled jail-house sounds of feet shuffling, toilets flushing, young voices competing with the television bolted to the wall of the common room. Elias’ eyes stay locked on his piece of paper. The sorrow and regret in his voice was so naked that the bravado and machismo that normally inhabit this room have evaporated like dew in the desert. Several boys are blinking hard.

None of them speak the answer to Elias’ 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 P.O., who had two hundred other kids to watch over and couldn’t be bothered. Elias never left his gang, as the judge had ordered, and no one cared. 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’ 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’ juvenile justice system: life in prison without possibility of parole 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?”

links for parents and families . links for kids

Every Day in America:

Every 4 minutes ... a child is arrested for drug abuse
Every 5 minutes ... a child is arrested for a violent crime
Every 92 minutes ... a child is killed by fire arms
Every 2 hours ... a child is a homicide victim
Every 4 hours ... a child commits suicide

Start Here:

A Brief History of Juvenile Court. Why do we even have a separate system for kids? Here’s why.

A longer history of juvenile court, courtesy of the National Council on Juvenile and Family Court Judges

Rage Against the Machine. Author’s essay on the frustrations and rewards of a juvenile hall volunteer.

Richard and George — Edward Humes’ testimony before the US Senate, in which the lives of two very different boys demonstrate the failings of juvenile court — and of the perennial proposals to fix it.

Facts About Children and the Law. An easy to read, simply organized overview, in Q&A format, of juvenile crime, the juvenile justice system, and current trends. Also touches on child welfare, foster care and other areas of the law in which children and young people are affected.

Frequently Asked Questions about Juveniles and Juvenile Court. A Justice Dept. compendium that explains terms, statutes, etc.

Do get-tough, try-as-adult juvenile justice policies work? A study conducted by the American Youth Policy Forum suggests this approach can make juvenile crime worse, particularly when it comes at the cost of ignoring or abandoning prevention efforts with younger juveniles. Both sides of the issue of trying juveniles as adults is also given excellent treatment on this PBS Frontline episode. How does your state handle the trying of juveniles in adult court. Check here to find out.

Dig Deeper:

Juvenile Justice Facts and Figures. Statistics on juvenile delinquency, juvenile court and related issues, nationally and by state.

ACLU Fact Sheet on Juvenile Justice

Juvenile Crime in California — the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s excellent report on juvenile crime in the nation’s largest state.

Juvenile Justice Links — excellent collection of links, divided into categories: crime prevention, juvenile justice, learning disability, victims, judicial education, school violence/school safety and child support

Juvenile Justice MegaLinks courtesy of Florida State University and Professor Cecil Greek. Very comprehensive.

The Juvenile Death Penalty. A report on the United States' practice of executing juvenile offenders. There have been 219 deaths sentence imposed on juvenile offenders since 1973; 21 have been executed, with 83 still on death row. An extensive report, by Prof. Victor L. Streib, of the Claude W. Pettit College of Law, Ohio Northern University.

ABA Juvenile Justice Center A wealth of information, reports and news on juvenile justice from the American Bar Association.

National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Site chocked with information, including a well-explained list of 38 specific recommendations to improve juvenile justice, and the premier annual conference on juvenile justice.

National Youth Gang Center Justice Department sponsored organization that researches youth gangs and ways in which the justice system and communities respond to them.

Youth Link.org, an excellent site about and for youth.

For Parents and Families

The Anti-Drug.com Help for parents and others who are concerned about youthful drug abuse and addiction. Provides brochures and advice on how to talk these issues out with your children without them tuning out.

Active Parenting Publishers Get a free anti-smoking video, parenting brochures and take a parenting test that measures your autocratic vs. permissive parenting styles at this site.

Talk With Kids. Need to talk to your kids about drugs, alcohol, violence, sex or AIDS, and don’t know where to begin? Welcome to the club — then visit this site for some smart advice. A partner site of the respected Children Now organization.

Early Warning, Timely Response: A Guide to Safe Schools

National Runaway Switchboard. Crisis assistance for kids and parents.

For Kids

Youth Crisis Hotline — 1-800-hit-home

National Runaway Switchboard — Crisis assistance for kids and parents.

Student Pledge Against Gun Violence. Take the pledge, and learn about how to avoid and prevent gun violence.

KidsPeace The national center for kids in crisis.

Teenwire. Brought to you by the folks at Planned Parenthood.

Freevibe. Information on drugs, addiction, finding help.

Student Rights. ACLU fact sheet, news, articles.