No Matter How Loud I Shout Read Online Free PDF Page B

so the year 1994 began with unaccustomed turmoil and uncertainty within the world’s largest juvenile court, a place now no longer merely at war with its young charges, but also at war with itself.

CHAPTER 1
January 1994
    Los Angeles County Superior Court
    Juvenile Court Division
    Thurgood Marshall Branch
    Inglewood, California
    T HE first thing you learn about this place,” Deputy District Attorney Peggy Beckstrand says as she conducts a brief tour of the battered juvenile courthouse she helps run, “is that nothing works.”
    It is 8:25 in the morning, a cold winter day, the sky as gray as an old skillet, an intermittent, muffled roar occasionally filtering into the building from somewhere outside—the steady stream of fat, full jetliners on final approach to LAX one freeway exit to the south. Inside, the locks on the courtroom doors are snicking back, fresh piles of manila-covered court files are being placed on the judge’s benches, lawyers are wading through the hundreds of kids and parents and witnesses gathered in the courthouse today, looking for a client they’ve never met, a witness they’ve never spoken to, a parent who can’t believe his or her child is a criminal, evidence be damned. Dirty mint-green buses with metal cages inside them are lumbering toward court from LA’s three enormous juvenile halls, carrying boys and girls wearing color-coded county-issue shirts and jeans, the color indicating their proclivity for violence or escape. The baddest kids sport coveralls in neon orange; their parents—those lucky enough to have a mom or dad interested enough to attend their court appearances—grip crumpled brown paper sacks with street clothes inside, hoping for an early release. In five minutes, court will be called into session, and the atmosphereis charged with a sweaty, anxious expectation, as if the entire building were a crowded elevator stuck between floors.
    â€œWe’re drowning,” Beckstrand flatly announces. She looks taller than her five feet six inches, due in part to her textbook posture. Exceedingly pale, with very long, very straight brown-blond hair, Beckstrand, a former Montessori teacher with a ribald sense of humor, enjoys a reputation for toughness that has left her decidedly unloved—and once sued—by her counterpart in the Public Defender’s Office. 1 “Look around,” she says of the chaos swirling in the hallways. “It just isn’t working.”
    She is not talking about the physical state of the place—the cracked and broken fixtures or the dysfunctional water coolers that dispense brackish water at body temperature—but of the juvenile system’s broader failings, the constant aura of futility that leaves this career prosecutor regularly muttering about walking away from it all. She is not the only one. Many who work these halls have heard about the new study circulating through the system that shows, among other things, that the Juvenile Court squanders most of its time and energy, focusing on the kids who are beyond redemption while ignoring the children who could best be helped. “As if we needed a study to tell us the obvious,” she says. Throughout the bureaucracy, everyone is buzzing about this study, expecting—or fearing—that it will bring massive and fundamental reform to a place that has not changed in many positive ways since the 1960s, and shows it. 2
    Beckstrand, for one, says she would welcome a shake-up, but she openly doubts the system’s ability to break its tired patterns. Her voice sounds just as tired. “We’re not rehabilitating these kids, and we’re sure as hell not punishing them. They can get away with murder here, and they know it. The law-breakers are winning, and we—society, those of us who obey the rules—are losing.”
    A young prosecutor she supervises grabs Beckstrand then, asking her to resolve one of the crises that