No Matter How Loud I Shout Read Online Free PDF

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