No Matter How Loud I Shout

Elias writes a letter to Sister Janet about being the youngest in prison and includes a poem about all his loved ones who have died, equating the pain of loss with growing up.

Dorn continues to try to fix Juvenile Court, which has gotten much less productive within the past year. Kids are committing more crimes without good rehabilitative options. Dorn makes snap decisions that are alternately harsher and more lenient, depending seemingly upon his whim. Usually, Dorn will give juveniles a break the first time they come into his courtroom, mostly to demonstrate his power over their lives. Dorn continues to give his speeches to kids, basically telling them that if they don’t want to die like most of their friends, they have to give up the life. Sometimes the kids seem to agree with Dorn, although Humes wonders if these kids are just parroting what Dorn wants them to say or whether he has actually changed their points of view: “It’s 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” (356). Some public defenders believe that Dorn is not the saint he pretends to be, but rather is still playing king and sending kids to camp represents his way of keeping control over them.

Juvenile crime has increased and is expected to continue to rise, with projections that 60% of LA County recidivist juveniles will be dead or in prison by age 20. These trends have led to harsher sentencing laws in various states, many of which have essentially taken to dismantling their own Juvenile Court systems. In California, new laws have been passed to sentence 14-year-olds to life in prison; however, this affects less than 1% of juvenile offenders.

Humes talks about how the JC system is both too harsh and too lenient, depending on the kid, and mostly due to this emphasis on age. The most problematic aspect of the JC system is the decrease in funds, which has led to greater punishment and overcrowding in detention halls because any kind of prevention or rehabilitative programs have been cut. Simultaneously, more kids are being released without even probation because there aren’t enough POs to handle them:

The budget cuts, then, are creating a Juvenile Court destined to fail even more often than before. That failure—in the form of repeat offenders—will increase the need for more lockups and more programs for the hardened, dangerous kids, which will in turn increase the pressure to try more children as adults because, the critic of Juvenile Court will argue, the system isn’t working (361).

Beckstrand quits JC, moving to adult court with her prosecutors. Stegall and Gold talk about quitting. Sister Janet refuses to quit and has been dedicating most of her time to helping a genius prodigy with no values and no name, who in another life, Sister Janet believes, would have been president. Sukoda still works on his detailed profile of repeat offenders, although the widespread changes these reports necessitate preclude them from being implemented any time soon. The DA has orchestrated a task force to reinvent the California JC, but thus far it has not been successful. Dorn continues working with status offenders and recidivists at the Thurgood Marshall Branch: “If he cannot save the entire system, then he will remake it within the walls of his own courthouse, where no one can tell him what to do” (364). Dorn still has many critics, whom he roundly dismisses, and he publicly criticizes all of the system’s other adults for their apathy.

As far as the kids go, Elias has been transferred to adult prison, where he will be the youngest person and not be offered any of the rehabilitative programs available at the CYA. Geri has been allowed to stay at the CYA, where he hopes to have finished his autobiography and a 4-year college degree by the time he gets out. John Sloan has apparently turned over a new leaf, graduating camp with honors and going onto college. George’s incompetent lawyer makes one last attempt to minimize George’s sentencing to no avail, although George is allowed to be housed at CYA, like Geri; however, a few weeks later, George is allegedly involved in a fight at CYA, so he gets transferred to adult prison for good. Duncan refuses to take responsibility for the Rusitanonta murders, and his age will allow him to go free at 25, and possibly before then, if his parole hearing goes well. Andre is going to community college, having left gang life behind, and Carla has as well, representing the only two true successes of those juveniles documented in the book, although John is also considered a success. Of the seven kids entered into the system, the system saved three, “proved itself impotent before the one remorseless killer among them […] and gave up on the rest […] [and] any one of the seven could have traded places with the others” (371).