No Matter How Loud I Shout

“It was ridiculous, he says, the system with its puny arsenal up against something far bigger and far deadlier. Elias’s 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 […] 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 […] But by then it was too late.” 

Humes uses Elias’s personal account to demonstrate the futility of the juvenile-justice system. There are two aspects of this futility: the social and the economic. The social aspect seems to be, by and large, the most crippling problem associated with the system. As Elias explains, he lives in an environment alternately embroiled both within the criminal justice system and in street violence. The way in which Elias describes these two social aspects of his home environment suggests that they are inextricably linked with one another, that is, that violence and the criminal justice system coexist in the lives of juveniles subjected to the justice system.

The economic aspect of the juvenile-justice system then further indicates the futility of the system, as it only dedicates a small portion of resources to fighting the systemic cycle of violence and punishment. Elias admits that the justice system is ultimately ineffective in environments such as his because it cannot change the violence inherent within these environments. Rather, another aspect of the social—fatherhood—must come into play in order for Elias to want to break free from what he views as his fate. Dorn’s fateful prophecy of the penitentiary or the cemetery is a reality that kids like Elias know all too well and seem to have accepted.

“Thirty years later, the system has yet to recover from that one lewd phone call, or from the hidden price tag attached to the reforms it spawned.” 

With this quotation, Humes makes two equally important arguments. In the first argument, Humes blames the In Re Gault court decision for the current state of the juvenile-justice system, which he believes to be woefully inadequate. In Re Gault asserted that children should be afforded the same protection as adults simply because they—and the other people responsible for their futures—are human; according to various international treaties, all humans should be afforded civil rights.

Humes argues that the reason that the current system is unable to effect any major change in the propensity of juveniles to commit crime is because the Gault decision increased the burden of proof required by the prosecution to hold juveniles accountable for their crimes.

Humes implicitly argues that juveniles should not be afforded the same protections as adults because they are not held to the same level of responsibility as adults in criminal courts. However, this completely detracts from the original point of the Gault decision, which found that juveniles were being held to much higher standards than adults, without the same level of civil protection.

The second argument that Humes makes is an economic one, an argument that casts the juvenile-justice system as something that costs people something, rendering it a kind of commodity. This commodification of the system is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it dehumanizes the children who are subjected to it. In thinking of the juvenile-justice system as something that citizens pay for, Humes obfuscates the fact that the decisions that arise in the juvenile justice system affect these children for the rest of their lives.

“‘Yeah, I have something to say,’ the savvy street urchin said, well trained by his many encounters with the system. ‘I want my lawyer.’” 

Humes recounts 16-year-old Richard Perez’s response to getting picked up for murdering a 17-year-old kid, presumably because the Latino kid was eating a burrito with a black kid. Humes’s seeming contempt for Richard, who Humes labels a street urchin, is palpable, especially when contrasted to how Humes views the innocent victim. Humes seems to forget Richard’s age—at 16 years old, he is a child, as any adult who has ever interacted with a 16-year-old will attest—and yet Humes presents Richard as some sort of hardened criminal, unrepentant and unwilling to change. However, Humes’ own vocabulary betrays him: as a “street urchin,” Richard has undoubtedly been subjected to the same sense of futility and environment of violence as many of the other kids.

Humes does not seem to question where Richard’s behavior comes from or why Richard chose to shoot another child. Instead, Humes paints Richard as a monster, one of those who cannot be saved and should be subjected to the same laws and punishments as adults. Herein lies the line that Humes repeatedly draws in the sand of the juvenile-justice system: the monsters who cannot be saved and should be locked up and the misunderstood kids who deserve the benefit of the doubt.

“Each side in the process—the prosecutors, the defenders, the judges, cops, and probation officers, the crime victims, the kids on trial here and their families—sees itself as being the one and only losing side. When a case lands in Juvenile Court, it is often hard to tell just who has won.” 

Humes suggests that Juvenile Court is a place in which no one feels like they win. Every person involved in a case feels like they must make some kind of sacrifice or compromise, which Humes seems to imply indicates the futility and failure of the juvenile-justice system itself. However, Humes fails to interrogate the nature of competition and the idea of winning. This quotation indicates Humes’s belief that the juvenile-justice system exists and is subject to a kind of social capitalism. In theory, a capitalist society thrives on competition, what economic theorists suggest to be at the root of human nature. However, this very act of competition for precedence over other people denies the communality inherent within the social contract itself: that is, that society should be striving for what is best for the collective, and not be concerned about whether an individual is winning or losing. After all, in the punitive system, it is not the individual but rather the collective that loses, as punitive measures negate the possibility for healing. In attempting to punish an individual, the system attempts to negate its own responsibility for that individual’s actions. Without interrogating the system’s—and, by extension, the community’s—culpability in an individual’s actions, there can be no wholesale change.

“Through a fluke of geography and bureaucracy, in one of the most racially and economically segregated regions of America, the three grimy courtrooms of Marshall Branch Juvenile Court have become the last great melting pot. Here, everyone finds a new common ground: fear. Fear of our own children.” 

Humes suggests that the juvenile-justice system serves as the last great melting pot of America amidst the rampant de facto segregation of heavily racialized school districts and income-regulated neighborhoods. However, even though people coexist within these spaces—that is, the wealthy are in the same physical space as those on welfare—various privileges related to race and socioeconomic status still exist. The idea that the juvenile justice system is any different than, say, metropolitan areas, in which people of varied socioeconomic status coexist in the same spaces can be called into question. Yes, these people are physically in the same spaces but that does not indicate that they are treated in any way similarly by the spaces themselves. In fact, to argue that a socioeconomically privileged kid—like John Sloan, for example—is treated in the same manner as say, George Trevino, who was raised by the state, is patently false, an assumption that Humes in fact argues against. Rather, the same socioeconomic privileges still apply and are in fact ingrained within the juvenile-justice system itself.

“She is part of a growing legion of kids whose criminal roots cannot be traced to any sort of abuse or deprivation, children who have potential, privilege, and solid families, yet take a turn toward darkness simply out of personal choice, who have the insight and ability to reflect about the immorality of what they are doing, then do it anyway. These are the kids who have […] the juvenile justice system stumped—and scared.” 

Humes believes that Carla represents the unconscionable shift in the latest generation, whereby kids from allegedly good families turn to crime out of sheer personal choice. But as Humes acknowledges later on in the book, kids do not turn to crime, if given valid, alternate choices. That is, the nature of society makes it so that crime is an aberration, clearly not the norm, as Humes points out here. Therefore, this idea that crime is not intrinsic to children’s behavior would suggest that some external force—or, quite possibly, a variety of forces—makes kids like Carla turn to lives of crime. 

“Typical of her sometimes morbid obsession with the gritty details of crime, Peggy had gone to a medical library to study this ballooning phenomenon so she could explain it all in court in clinical detail—even though she knew the judge hearing the case would not be the least bit interested […] ‘If this were a real court,’ she says with biting contempt, ‘there would be no question. I’d have to do this.’” 

For Beckstrand’s flaws, she cannot be said to be apathetic. Beckstrand knows that she takes JC more seriously than perhaps any other figure in the book, constantly working against the apathy inherent within the system’s bureaucracy. However, Beckstrand’s resolution also has negative consequences, as it makes her incredibly jaded. Her argument that JC is not real court implies that it exists merely as a façade, a pale shadow of the reality of punitive consequences. Herein lies the heart of JC’s futility: the belief that the consequences, or even the court itself, is not real. Therefore, many people—prosecutors, defense attorneys, even some judges—believe that the consequences of JC do not matter. However, this is at odds with the nature of the juvenile justice system, which has the power to push 16-year-olds into adult court, where punitive consequences follow these children for the rest of their lives. In this way, Beckstrand’s assertion that JC does not matter or is not real rings false precisely because it can have overwhelming, if transitive, consequences.

“Through luck or design or simple accident of birth, he would remain swathed in the protections of Juvenile Court, which in California meant he would have to go free by age twenty-five. Period. There could be no appeal, no exception: That was the law in California. Are you sixteen or over at the instant the trigger is pulled? Then go to adult court, face life in prison without parole.” 

Humes describes the law surrounding Ronald Duncan, specifically identifying the justice system’s inability to try Duncan as an adult for a crime committed nine days shy of his sixteenth birthday. The reader cannot help but agree that this definition between childhood and adulthood seems arbitrary; however, one is left to question why a 16-year-old can be tried and punished as an adult without legally being rendered an adult. The idea that a crime committed when a person is 16 can legally propel them into adulthood concretely establishes punishment as the defining force within the justice system. A 16-year-old cannot be afforded the same rights as a legal adult; he or she cannot, for example, vote or even be emancipated without parental agreement. However, she or he can be convicted and sentenced to life in prison, emphasizing that the social contract which binds us all is predicated on the threat of punishment. In essence, we remain free in American society only because we have not been incarcerated and subjected to punishment. In this way, freedom cannot be extricated from punishment itself, and any arguments that the criminal justice system serves to rehabilitate ignores the inherently punitive nature of the social contract itself. The design of the criminal justice system, therefore, is to attest to our freedom by subjecting others to the punishment of un-freedom, suggesting freedom cannot exist without incarceration.

“‘It’s all a double standard. You have to be rich and white for that defense to work,’ Elias says. He has previously advanced the theory that the single most important fact in a court case is the color of the defendant, something that virtually every kid in the hall seems to take as a given. Elias nods at Geri. ‘You think anyone is going to let him off because of what his parents did to him? A black kid? Shit.’” 

Humes seems skeptical at Elias’s suggestion that the single most important factor for a juvenile delinquent in terms of sentencing is race; however, this assertion is something that all of Elias’s peers already know. Here, we see the difference between what Humes has been exposed to as a white man and the reality that these kids face every day as black and brown juveniles. 

“Three minutes after entering the courtroom, without ever uttering a word, without interrupting the DA’s conversation with his witness or the defense attorney’s shuffling of files, the boy leaves, escorted back to the holding tank. No one spoke with him or acknowledged his presence. There is a deliberately fostered anonymity to this, furthered by the practice of never calling the child by his name, even as he or she sits mutely in court, life laid open for legal dissection. In Juvenile Court, a child is simply referred to as ‘the minor.’” 

In JC, the juvenile remains anonymous and is never even referred to by name. This anonymity also extends even further, as children are often decontextualized from their histories, in which they are usually the victims. This places the blame for the crime on the shoulders of these children; extenuating circumstances are rarely offered for their actions unless indicated by a well-paid defense attorney, such as John Sloan’s. Essentially, the JC allows for juveniles to pay to be able to provide context for their actions, which many of the kids are unable to do. In describing the anonymity associated with the JC, Humes also implicitly points to the voicelessness these kids have, which in and of itself remains a kind of equality. No matter their socioeconomic positionality, it seems, these kids are not allowed to speak for themselves, demonstrating the lack of agency the system allows juveniles. 

“Adult court’s purpose was to warehouse criminals, he complained, but in Juvenile Court, lives could still be changed for the better.” 

This quotation indicates one of the main problems associated with Humes’s discussion of the juvenile-justice system: it lacks adequate discussion of the arbitrary nature of considering a person legally an adult once they turn 18. Admittedly, this discussion does not seem to be something that Humes is interested in; if anything, he seems to argue that sentencing a 16-year-old to adult prison can be seen as acceptable under the correct circumstances, like those of Ronald Duncan, for example.

However, the very idea that someone legally becomes an adult at 18 is outdated at best, especially concerning recent research that suggests that a person’s brain is not fully developed until they are 25. The idea that an 18-year-old cannot legally drink but can be sentenced to life in prison demonstrates the arbitrary nature of law itself; law is created by fallible humans and therefore itself must also be fallible. This quotation suggests a kind of dichotomy between adulthood and childhood that is inherent within the law but does not exist in reality, leading the observant reader to question why such arbitrary distinctions within the justice system exist at all. 

“The stated goal of a fitness hearing—bald heresy in a system founded so long ago on the notion that there is no such thing as a bad kid—is to save some children, and discard the rest. […]The boy’s fate rests with a simple equation: measure the child against the crime he committed, then divide the total by Judge Dorn’s willingness to break the law. For only a flat refusal to enforce a state law that virtually mandates his transfer to adult court can save John now […] The real question Dorn will be trying to answer […] is whether John Sloan is worth the trouble.” 

The current juvenile-justice system divides children into essentially two groups: those who can be saved and those who cannot be. Inherent within this division is the belief that some kids are just born bad, whereas others have made poor choices but are inherently good, an often arbitrary distinction made entirely based on the whims of the juvenile-justice system’s adults. This choice is permanent and absolute; there can be no going back on choosing to discard a child. However, even though this choice exists, Hume suggests that the choice itself stands at odds with the current law, which requires children over 16 to be tried as adults.

In this way, the ability to refuse the law exists as a purely adult choice; although children are being punished for not upholding the law, the same punishment is not meted out to adults who choose to disregard it, demonstrating the inherent arbitrary applicability of the law itself. In order to make the decision as to whether or not he will abide by the law, Dorn must contemplate the worthiness of the child in question, demonstrating that the law is not absolute but arbitrary, again depending upon the belief in a dichotomy between good and evil. In this way, the law represents no more than a mechanism by which adults can control the future of children; legality is no longer a question of morality, but one of agency.

“Cartoon’s reading is interrupted here by a burly detention officer, who opens the door and peers into the library. He eyes each kid, that sizing-up look cops and prison guards always seem to wear. The eyes settle on Cartoon. ‘Santos. Time to go.’ A chorus of protests from the other kids draws a glare. I beg for five more minutes, and, after a moment, the man relents, shaking his head as if we were all wasting our time. But Cartoon gets to finish his story.” 

Humes emphasizes the discerning and judgmental eyes of the detention officer, who looks at the kids as though he does not trust them. Although he focuses on each individual, the detention officer also looks at them the exact same way, as though his eyes only see the fact that they are all juvenile offenders, not that they are individuals. He takes the kids at face value, judging their risk with a single glance. In this way, the detention officer embodies the juvenile-justice system itself, which rarely gives more than a cursory glance at these kids before deciding their fate. Humes also emphasizes the importance of voices here, in regard to the relative agency of characters. As an adult, the detention officer’s voice is law, despite the many protesting voices of the kids. It is only when another adult, Humes, speaks that the law can be altered, depicting the relative voicelessness of children within the juvenile justice. In this way, voices become synonymous with agency, which is afforded to adults but not to children within the current system.

“‘It doesn’t get any safer than this,’ he had proudly boasted to his wife and daughters when they found a home they could afford there. That sense of ease and security evaporated when John Sloan and his friend popped up from behind a dark green Pontiac, wearing gloves and bandannas, slinging a gun and racial epithets, seemingly full of hatred and violence.” 

Humes gives some of the background on Joseph, who is one of the few victims given a voice within the book. Joseph moved to a richer neighborhood in suburbia because he believed that it would be safer for his family. However, when John Sloan and Richard attempt to rob him, that sense of security vanishes. The reason why Joseph is so upset at John is not just due to the robbery, then, but due to John’s ability to destroy Joseph’s ability to purchase security. John’s attempted robbery shatters the idea that money can buy safety, or rather, that money can protect you from having to experience and/or being subjected to violence. In this way, a fundamental aspect of American society seems to lie in the perception that one can purchase protection from violence, demonstrating the length to which capitalism asserts control over individual bodies. Part of the problem of John Sloan is that he either disregards or demonstrates the inherent fallibility of this capitalist conception, as violence can seemingly be perpetrated in any context despite socioeconomic status and privilege.

“At age 6, when a policeman found him abandoned in the filthy Dodge van that was his only home, his mother a fugitive later imprisoned for manslaughter, George Trevino became a ‘300 kid.’ That’s what they called him, right there in court, one of those unintentionally dehumanizing verbal shorthands so common in the juvenile system. As he walked into court today, he heard the judge and the probation officer discussing his case in hushed voices […] everyone kind of nodded as if to say, Oh, that explains it.” 

Humes describes the harrowing circumstances under which George became a ward of the state. We see the environment of violence unto which George was subjected as well as the dehumanizing terminology the state uses in order to group him into a specific category. Humes describes how categorizations can erode a person’s sense of their own humanity, possibly making that person feel as though they have no agency in his life. Although these shorthands, as Humes calls them, allow for the quick and efficient communication of knowledge between adults, the system does not take into account the child’s feelings regarding this categorical delineation. The adults believe that this category explains George’s behavior, as if to indicate that he never had a chance. Implicit within this assertion, then, is the knowledge that the system is ineffective. Essentially, Humes blames the state for George’s actions, as it did not provide the stability and safety that George needed. In this way, George is completely denied the agency in his own actions; the state has essentially taken away his ability to have free will. At the same time, the juvenile justice system essentially treats these cases the same in the name—but not the implementation—of equality. George is then held responsible for actions the state believes he had no control over, rendering him essentially a martyr for the juvenile-justice system. 

“Let him look at those evidence pictures first, she figures. Theoretically, they should not influence his decision on the separate issue of the confession’s voluntariness, but Peggy knows better. Judges are human, too.” 

Here, Humes imagines Beckstrand contemplating the arbitrary nature of the juvenile-justice system, which relies entirely upon human fallibility. In theory, the law does not allow for these depictions of the grisly murder of the Rusitanontas to influence the judge’s decision on a separate matter, namely whether Duncan’s confession was voluntary. However, Beckstrand knows that a human cannot remain unbiased once s/he has seen evidence of the crime, especially when the evidence is as damning as these crime scene photographs. Therefore, Beckstrand decides to play off of the judge’s natural humanity in order to receive the judgement that she wants, which is to allow Duncan’s coerced confession into play. These two decisions have no relevance to one another, and yet the nature of the justice system allows them to be linked together, demonstrating the inherent fallibility and relativity of the law itself. 

“The system has won, not with jail cells or boot camps or harsh new laws, but with a young street tough spoon-feeding a little girl with cerebral palsy […] The pressure will return [….] the people in court make it sound so easy. They don’t have to live in his world, where gang membership is for life, and quitting can have fatal consequences.” 

Here, Humes demonstrates the futility of the punitive system. After all, punishment does not work, as clearly demonstrated by numerous examples and the 16 Percenters. Rather, the system as it stands, and perhaps the very idea of punishment itself, lacks the humanity necessary to reconstruct the way these kids think. A common thread found throughout all of these stories is the lack of agency that these kids feel; as a result, many of them seem to think that their actions have no consequences or rather that their behavior cannot have any positive influences. However, with programs like those at the Rosewood school, kids like Andre find agency; they come to see the positive effects that something as small as kindness can have on other people, especially those less fortunate than themselves. However, even programs like the Rosewood school offer little support after these kids leave to go back to their often-violent environments.

“Everytime he was placed in a structured setting, he did well, with good grades, good behavior. But then he would return to the same impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood, the same lack of supervision at home, the same old homeboys urging him to return to his gang and criminal ways. No one ever taught him all the little things you need to know to hold down a job: to be on time […] the kids of Juvenile Court tend to be bereft of these basics—that’s one reason why they have such lousy records in school.”

Hickey speaks about Scrappy, who is almost entirely a product of his environment. Hickey demonstrates how whenever Scrappy lived in a stable home environment, he was able to avoid falling into past behaviors. However, due to the ineffectiveness and lack of monetary resources of the juvenile-justice system, once Scrappy started excelling, he would be returned to the same old violent environment in which he grew up, and his criminal behavior would return. Hickey suggests the continued need for kids to live in stable and positive home environments not only once they begin to show positive changes in their behaviors but also after, so as to encourage these positive changes. 

“[Sister Janet] knows the awful facts that brought Elias to her, that night in Hollywood, when he and a pickup truck full of homeboys and home girls went out on a ‘mission.’ That’s what they called their armed escapades in search of robbery victims, heroic terminology borrowed from old war movies by kids at war with the world. There was nothing heroic about it, though, Elias says.” 

Even though Elias and his crew try to maintain the appearance of adults through their actions, their language indicates the childish naiveté of their world conceptions. Without adult role models available to them in reality, they seem to look to television and movies in order to mimic the behavior they see there. There is something deeply tragic in this mimicry, as though they can relate more to those adults in war movies than they can to Humes, for example. Humes’s statement that these kids are at war with the world seems syntactically incorrect; after all, many of these kids seem to feel that the world is at war with them, their home environments so violent and volatile as to be reminiscent of the environmental chaos of war. It makes sense, then, that these kids look to the behaviors of these actors for suggestions as to what to do and how to behave. However, when confronted with the reality of consequences, Elias recognizes that there is nothing heroic about war. Rather, it makes people do drastic things, and drastic actions have drastic consequences. But the idea that these kids will face punishment for the actions that they believed to be almost required of them seems misguided and inherently unjust. After all, they were merely playing the role that society had prescribed for them, yet society is not held responsible. 

“Then she had taken him for a ride in her Jaguar sedan […] Sharon didn’t tell him she had gotten it used at an obscenely low price because its previous owner considered it a lemon and that, in any case, the credit union owned the lion’s share of it. What mattered was that it looked like a rich man’s car, which was the message she wanted this boy to take home: that hardworking, honest people could live well […] The boy was not lazy—he was capable of boosting a dozen cars in a single day—and he got the message. He went to work. Now he is enjoying the payoff.” 

Stegall uses all of the tools at her disposal in order to cajole the kids into turning over a new leaf. She seems to know that their world—a mirrored reflection of our own—only prioritizes appearances and so plays off of this knowledge, using her expensive car to impress the kids. However, this manipulation is problematic as it attempts to assure kids of something that is not true: with hard work, they will live the high life. Her life is not easy, and she has money problems, but she is not honest to the kids about this because she does not think they will respect her as much. 

“‘I was just thinking about foster homes […] It’s like you’re no better than trash. You’re so low, not even your own parents want you. At least when you’re a delinquent and you get taken from your home, it’s because of some crime you did. It doesn’t mean your parents don’t want you. But when you go into foster care, that’s worse. That means nobody wants you. You’re just out like the trash.’”

One of the kids in Humes’s writing class argues that being a delinquent is better than being in foster care, much to Humes’s horror. Prior to this statement, Humes does not seem to consider the depressing situations within which these kids grew up. Rather, he seems to expect that they had a similar upbringing to his own, although this is doubtful to say the least. Many of the kids in Humes’s writing class have been exposed to the foster care system at one point in their lives, and so they can all relate when their classmate argues that he blames himself. He says that he turns to delinquency because it does not make him feel as demeaned as the foster care system, in part because it affords him some amount of agency. These kids can choose to be delinquents and in that choice, as in all choices, there is power. For the first time, Humes seems to recognize just how powerless and worthless these kids feel as a result of their involvement with the child welfare system.

“Each time a new case is called, the public defender on duty picks up one of these blank forms, fills in the juvenile’s name, and files the paper. There is no consulting with the client—this is about teaching Judge Dorn a lesson, not about what might or might not be best for any particular kid. Most of them, freshly arrested and dazed at their loss of freedom, appear not to really understand what is going on. No one explains it to them.” 

As a result of Judge Dorn’s arrogance and refusal to abide by the law, the public defender’s office decides to paper Dorn, essentially forcing JC to come to a grinding halt and costing these kids days if not weeks of their lives in continuances and other futile endeavors. The focus of this antagonism, however, is not any particular kid, but rather Dorn; that is, the public defenders are not doing this because they think that it serves their clients’ best interests but rather because another adult made them angry. The adults are essentially getting into the same kind of turf war that they are attempting to prevent the kids from participating in, where the power to choose—even if it is a wrong and inconveniencing choice—becomes of paramount importance.

“When you say crazy, the cops had asked, you really are trying to say he was mean, right? The last thing they wanted was to set up an insanity plea. Under this prodding, the kids readily agreed that’s what they meant to say: He was mean.” 

Humes demonstrates how the police use questionable—if not downright illegal—tactics to try to railroad Hugh into getting convicted. Despite the fact that they know these witnesses are of questionable credibility, considering they had previously not been able to recognize the shooters, the cops go with their testimony regardless, never taking a minute to stop and question this trajectory. Their job, at least in this instance, it seems, is not so much to get criminals off the streets but to make sure that someone pays for the crime; it does not seem to matter if that person is innocent. The cops then lead the witnesses to make a statement that best serves this interest, essentially putting their own words within the mouths of these witnesses. They are writing the report that they want to create, regardless of the fallout and the way in which this could affect a kid’s life for decades to come. However, their bottom line is more important than these kids’ lives, as this exchange makes clear.