Text of Edward Humes’ Remarks to the US Senate Subcommittee on Children, Youth & Families

July 1996

I am an author and journalist with sixteen years of experience reporting on crime and the criminal justice system for newspapers, magazines and in four books. My most recent book, NO MATTER HOW LOUD I SHOUT: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court (Simon & Schuster, March 1996), is an account of my year of observation in the nation’s largest juvenile justice system, the Los Angeles Juvenile Court.

In late 1993, I received a court order granting me unprecedented access to otherwise secret hearings and records, setting aside the wall of confidentiality that is intended to protect children, but which in practice shields the court from scrutiny and accountability. My goal was a full and fair portrait of the system’s day-to-day workings. I wanted to avoid focusing on the sensational, extraordinary cases that normally garner headlines — cases that, unfortunately, have come to dominate the debate about juvenile justice reform, even though they are aberrations. Rather, I wanted to zero in on the ordinary, daily successes and failures that are the real glory and scandal of the system — how we do or don’t deal with the truants and shoplifters, the vandals and petty thieves, the minor offenders who might still be turned from lives of crime. In this effort, I was fortunate to have not only the juvenile court’s full cooperation, but also the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office’s and the Los Angeles County Probation Department’s, with both agencies allowing me to closely observe their front-line juvenile workers on the job. Finally, I worked as a volunteer with the Catholic Chaplain’s Office at Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall. I taught a creative writing class on the High Risk Offender Unit there, where the majority of my students had been transferred to adult court on charges of murder, attempted murder, or armed robbery. I believe these different points of access gave me an unusually broad view of the system.

Two boys

At the outset, I should say that a very comprehensive study of first-time offenders in Los Angeles shows that 57 percent of first time juvenile offenders never come back. One arrest is enough for the majority of kids. And this is true no matter what the court does, or even if it does nothing. These kids just seem to straighten out on their own. But it is the other 43 percent we need to focus on, for when the court does nothing with them as they enter the system, disaster awaits, crime is encouraged, and children are lost. And if you sit in the courtrooms and watch as I did, you see that happen every day. Indeed, in Los Angeles, you can see that happen hourly, many times over.

I would like to tell you about two boys I wrote about in NO MATTER HOW LOUD I SHOUT. By coincidence, these young men ended up in the same juvenile courthouse on the same day before the same judge, each of them 16, each of them facing hearings to decide whether they should be tried as juveniles or transferred to adult court. I believe these two cases illustrate the most egregious problems in our juvenile courts. They may also point the way to possible reforms.

Richard Perez’s criminal career began at age 13 with a car theft, following years of misbehavior in school, truancy and incorrigibility. He was released within six hours of the car-theft arrest, and was not summoned back to court for five months, at which time he failed to appear. When he was finally brought into court, he pleaded guilty to joy riding and received probation.

From the moment he settled his case, Richard busted curfew, smoked marijuana, continued running with his gang, and generally defied every condition of probation the court had set. No one noticed. His probation officer, as is typical in L.A., had nearly 200 kids to supervise, an impossible burden she attempted to handle primarily through monthly phone calls to her charges. Probation “supervision” is, in Los Angeles Juvenile Court and many other jurisdictions around the nation, often no supervision at all. After Richard had failed to show up at school for nearly a month, the probation officer finally drove to his address, which proved to be fictitious. No one had checked it out before his release.

Another car-theft arrest brought him back to court a month later. Again he went home on probation, this time to live in an unsecured group home for wayward boys conveniently located near his old gang turf. Three more arrests — two for assault and one for a violent strong-arm robbery in which Richard broke a woman’s nose in order to steal her six-pack of beer — failed to interrupt his probation. He was released from custody after each arrest. He remained home on probation, awaiting trial for the robbery, under conditions of probation he had never obeyed in two years of court “supervision.” He could have been detained at that point, or his probation could have been revoked. But the court continued to classify him as a minor offender unworthy of serious attention.

Two months after the beer robbery, before the D.A.’s office had waded through its backlog of cases sufficiently in order to file formal charges in the case, Richard walked into a restaurant in the Lynnwood area of L.A. County and approached a seventeen-year-old boy who was sitting with a friend, munching on a burrito. Richard asked the boy what gang he was in. The boy answered truthfully: He said he was not in a gang. Richard must not have liked this response. He pulled a gun from his coat pocket and fatally shot the young man.

At the hearing to determine his fitness to be tried as a juvenile or adult, Richard’s lack of remorse and utter contempt for a system that had never held him accountable was obvious. He threw spitballs during the court session, he laughed at witnesses, he sat with his feet cocked Charlie Chaplain style, a blatant gang pose. The juvenile commissioner presiding at this fitness hearing transferred him to adult court without compunction — as is typical in such cases. He eventually received a 25-year-to-life sentence.

The next fitness hearing that day involved a boy named George Trevino. George had entered the system at age five, not as a victimizer, but as a victim. He was removed from an abusive parent (a mother who eventually died in prison). He was separated from a brother and sister and shunted from one foster home to another. He was entrusted to neglectful, drug-addicted guardians. He was allowed to roam the streets, to experiment with drugs, to drop out of school and to join a gang — all the while in the care and custody of the juvenile court as a dependent child. One day, when George was 13, he came to the aid of a friend in a school-yard brawl. During the fighting, another boy wielded a broken bottle as a weapon. Everyone, including George, was charged with felony assault. The foster-care system dropped George immediately and he entered the delinquency side of the juvenile court (a shockingly common migration, with about 3,000 kids moving from foster-care to delinquency ever year in Los Angeles alone). The two sides of the court do not communicate, and George stopped receiving the psychological counseling that had previously been considered essential.

George was sent home on probation with the same drug-abusing foster parent. He ran away and was caught riding in a car someone else had stolen. He received probation once more, with the same level of supervision Richard Perez had received: none. After another arrest and release for theft, he ran away from home again, and began living on the streets, where an adult gang member took him under his wing. This man used George. He talked him and two other juveniles into participating in an armed home-invasion robbery. Fortunately, the crime was badly planned and badly executed; the only one hurt was the adult ringleader, who was shot in the leg by his intended victim. George and the other kids ran off but were soon arrested.

Two of the kids were under sixteen; one received probation, the other went to detention camp for six months. The adult ringleader entered a plea and received an eight-year prison sentence. That left George, 16 by then, to face the most serious potential penalty. The court commissioner holding his fitness hearing was nearly in tears at the prospect of transferring him to adult court. She called his case a travesty. She said the court had performed abysmally in caring for him, though it would never be held accountable for its mistakes. She said she had no doubt that he had potential to reform and that the best thing for George and for society would be to keep him in the juvenile system and, for once, to do it right. But she said she could not do that. The law governing transfer to adult court was so tough, the commissioner said, that it did not let her distinguish a hapless George Trevino from a sociopathic Richard Perez. She ordered him to adult court, too.

During a year in juvenile hall awaiting trial — the first stable and safe environment he had known in years — George advanced three grade levels, earned his GED, became a peer counselor, was widely praised by the juvenile hall staff, won a city-wide essay contest for high school students sponsored by the Los Angeles Times (one of his poems is the source of the title of my book), and he was runner-up for student of the year for the L.A. County Department of Education. His adult court judge heard none of this, however. George’s court-appointed lawyer didn’t bother to investigate, nor did the probation department include such information in its sentencing report to the judge. Instead, this report stated there was nothing positive about George, and the writer even claimed he had been raised by gang members since age five, when in fact he had been raised by the state. George’s fate was sealed; he is now serving a twelve-year prison sentence.

Pay me now, or pay me later

What can we learn from these two cases? I believe they both amply demonstrate the dire consequences of ignoring so-called “minor” juvenile offenders. We have become so fixated on the most serious, violent kids that we are doing nothing with the entry-level small fry — until some of them become hard enough and dangerous enough to warrant incarceration or transfer. But by then, it’s too late — too late for the juveniles, and too late for their victims.

The court should have acted decisively with detention, meaningful supervision and appropriate counseling and punishment early on in both cases. A week in the hall followed by a genuine, in-your-face probation when Richard first stole a car (or first started throwing chairs in class, for that matter) might have interrupted his downward spiral. Later, revocation of his probation could have landed him in camp or one of the state’s juvenile lock-ups where, if not rehabilitated, he at least would have been prevented from committing murder in a Lynnwood restaurant. And a probation that involved actual supervision of juveniles might have detected George’s problems, misbehavior and running away before he fell in with an adult criminal. If he could show his potential so thoroughly in a year in L.A. Central Juvenile Hall — which I can assure you is no Club Med — think what could have been accomplished with him earlier in the process... and at what savings to taxpayers, now that we are going to spend more than $300,000 to incarcerate him.

The scary part of all this is that neither of these kids is particularly unusual. I observed that this pattern of free passes to minor offenders is an everyday occurrence in juvenile court. Virtually every kid who is transferred to adult court has been in the juvenile system for years without benefit or effect. Very few have experienced any meaningful sanctions or supervision while on probation. They know they can commit crimes with impunity. George Trevino once said to me that, though he knew he was responsible for his crimes, he nevertheless felt “set up” — as if the system had dared him to commit more crimes. Many of the other kids in my writing class said this as well — they were allowed to get away with so much early on that they felt there was no pressure to straighten out. Judge Roosevelt Dorn of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court made a similar observation. He has said that the system’s refusal to take minor offenders seriously is “programming children for the cemetery or the penitentiary.”

Another problem that the Perez/Trevino cases illustrate lies in the sweeping nature of California’s laws governing transfer to adult court — the fitness law. There is a world of difference between these two boys. I have no doubt that Richard is where he belongs. He proved himself a remorseless murderer from whom the public must be protected, regardless of his age. I am just as sure that George Trevino would be in college now rather than prison had he not been transferred to adult court. He has never hurt anyone in his life. He deserved a break, but the law, in its current form, could offer him none. Legally, there is no difference between these two boys when considering their fitness to remain in juvenile court. Many professionals questioned whether this lack of flexibility and loss of judicial discretion is really in the best interest of public safety.

It is my observation that there is no problem getting kids like Richard Perez into adult court once they cross the line under current laws. Most Juvenile Court judges happily transfer them and those that refuse are invariably reversed on appeal. So we are already dealing with our dangerous and violent juvenile predators quite handily. But in our zeal to protect ourselves from kids like Richard with ever-tougher laws, we are scooping up young people like George in the process.

I believe anyone who spends time observing juvenile court in action will come to one inescapable conclusion: The system will not be fixed by continuing to focus on the worst of the worst. It can only be fixed by centering the debate on the first-time, minor offenders. Fourteen-year-olds who commit serious, violent felonies are certainly despicable and dangerous, and they must be dealt with decisively. But understand: They account for only a tiny fraction of the overall juvenile delinquent population. Yet they are the justification for major pieces of legislation at the federal and state level, the principal effect of which will be to transfer thousands more kids out of the juvenile court and into the adult system.

Contrast this with what many prosecutors and cops and probation officers I met in juvenile court kept telling me: that we need to transform Juvenile Court into a crime prevention machine, instead of the incubator for criminals that it has often become. There are many opinions about how to accomplish this: Some proposals now before the legislator would put teeth back into status offense laws. Others want to identify at-risk kids earlier and voluntarily bring them and their families into some kind of prevention programs. An informal youth court has been proposed. I will not comment on the merits of these ideas, other than to say that such proposals ought to lie at the center of any serious debate about how to make juvenile court work better — and how to reduce youth crime and violence. We are very effectively taking care of the young predators we so fear — too effectively, perhaps, as the case of George Trevino illustrates. Now is the time to focus on the other 99 percent of juvenile delinquents.

Juvenile justice is a pay me now or pay me later system. Right now, we are choosing the latter in far too many cases — ignoring kids who are ticking time bombs and waiting until they murder, rape and rob before the court takes significant action. The debate should be about how the Juvenile Court can better deal with minor offenders before they become predators. This is not a liberal or conservative issue; this is an issue of public safety. As one detective on a juvenile murder case told me, a juvenile court that stops minor offenders in their tracks would save kids, cut crime, save crime victims, and save money by turning at least some of these kids around before they need long stays in our expensive prison cells.

Flaws that stand out: Making the system smarter

How can that be done? Some flaws in the system with widespread impact become painfully obvious if you sit in the courtrooms, watching the ebb and flow.

1. It doesn’t take a year of watching the system to figure out that the court’s inability to deal effectively with first-time offenders is due in large part to ineffective probation. Caseloads of 100 to 200 kids are not workable. In the Sixties, when juvenile crime was far less serious in number and severity, probation officers in L.A. had as few as 15 juveniles to supervise. The Council on Crime in American, chaired by William Bennett, recently reported that, as a nation, we spend an average of $200 per probationer per year (versus $25,000 per prison inmate, over $30,000 a year in juvenile lockups). We are getting in many cases what we are paying for: Nothing. If we are going to place young people on probation, we ought to provide credible supervision. The kids know they are not being watched. They feel emboldened and encouraged by meaningless conditions of probation no one attempts to enforce. Consider the hapless parent who idly threatens punishment to a misbehaving child, then does nothing when the misbehavior is repeated, and you begin to understand why juvenile court is failing.

Short of hiring an army of new probation officers, one solution long considered though never undertaken is to decentralize probation. Instead of having probation officers tucked away in remote offices far from the courts and the kids, it has been proposed for years that the department station juvenile probation officers in the schools, where they can see their charges every day, monitor their behavior and attendance, and generally exercise meaningful control of kids in desperate need of supervision. Such a system could actually lead to a cost savings by eliminating the need for separate office buildings for probation officers. Lack of communication between school systems and the juvenile justice system — long a source of frustration and friction — would be replaced by cooperation and an improved ability to deal with truancy, the number one risk factor for delinquency.

2. For a variety of legal reasons, the Juvenile Court has become a mirror image of adult court — emphasizing legal ritual above all else. Juvenile Court should work like a legal emergency room, quickly intervening in the lives of kids committing crimes. Instead, it lumbers along like the old Soviet economy. Five months can pass between arrest and trial, an eternity for a kid in a downward spiral. Confessions must be litigated, suppression hearings held. Crimes must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (an adult criminal court standard that seems oddly out of place in juvenile court, which is, after all, a civil arena, where adult-style sanctions are unavailable). Only after all the legalities are attended to is the essential question asked: What do we do with this kid? And if there is no conviction, nothing is done, even in cases where a young person before the court is clearly in desperate need of services, counseling or detention.

Contrast this to the handling of child abuse cases. When abuse by parents is suspected, a child can be immediately removed from the home. Then the case is litigated and a determination is made as to whether or not abuse can be proved. Why should the standard be any different in delinquency court? Why does the court not act immediately to counsel, supervise or restrain a suspected delinquent prior to litigation of the case? All too often I observed kids commit several additional crimes while awaiting trial on a first-offense. Had the court taken immediate and resolute action at the outset, this could have been avoided. The focus of juvenile court should be the child, not the crime.

3. Another common occurrence I observed is the use of technical defenses to free young people from the court’s supervision. Graffiti cases are a prime example. A child can be caught red-handed by police spray-painting gang slogans and obscenities of the wall of a house. For the case to be sustained, the D.A. must bring in the homeowner to testify that he did not give the vandal permission to deface his home — patently obvious, absurd testimony that is nevertheless essential under the law. In neighborhoods troubled by gangs, some homeowners are reluctant to testify. The result: Case dismissed, the kid walks out laughing at the impotence of the system.

Car theft cases are another example: The owner of a stolen car must come in to testify that he did not give permission to the juvenile who hacked his dashboard to pieces and hot-wired his ignition. Every week, I watched these crime victims trudge to court, missing work and waiting all day, only to be told their case had been continued and that they would have to come back again. Witnesses and crime victims are treated shabbily in Juvenile Court, where confidentiality rules keep them in the dark, and where crowded court dockets and courtroom strategy make repeated delays inevitable. Many witnesses — even police officers subpoenaed to testify — simply stop coming after one or two such futile days spent waiting. I saw hundreds of car theft and graffiti cases dismissed in this way. I saw one young man charged with shooting a police officer walk out the door because a key witness didn’t show up after repeated continuances. Three weeks later, that young man murdered a seventeen-year-old boy in a drive-by shooting.

Defense lawyers in juvenile court say they are ethically and legally obliged to pursue such dismissals (rather than stipulate to the fact that their clients had no permission to deface property or steal cars). They do this even when walking a kid out the door may be the worst possible outcome for everyone. By the same token, prosecutors feel compelled to respond in kind, pursuing the harshest possible sanctions, even when that may not be the best outcome. Attorneys on both sides of this adversarial process say they feel frustrated when their legal obligations get in the way of helping children. Some suggested thought be given to redefining the duties of counsel in Juvenile Court. Others believed that a loosening of legal burdens of proof and elements of certain offenses might be appropriate for juvenile court.

4. Finally, it became clear to me as I sat in Juvenile Court that this was the unwanted stepchild of the justice system. It is often said that children are society’s most precious resource, but this broken down system we’ve created to deal with them gets the least resources, the least experienced prosecutors, the most overworked probation officers. The Juvenile Court building in Inglewood was condemned as an adult Municipal Court before being passed on to the juvenile system like a gnawed bone. Central Juvenile Hall is still waiting for repairs from the 1994 earthquake, though other damaged county facilities were long ago repaired. There are heroes who labor against all odds to save kids despite the system’s failings — and their extraordinary efforts pay off. I have seen it. I have seen kids turned around, their lives changed, when one of these extraordinary people get involved. But for many others working in the system, juvenile court is more stigma than inspiration. Many of the lawyers and judges consider it a punishment. This should be a place where the stars of our judiciary want to work. Instead, only a handful want to be there. Forums in which whiplash claims and contract disputes are resolved are considered a higher calling. As long as that attitude remains pervasive — in and out of the juvenile court — fixes for the system may well remain elusive.

There are 28 delinquency courtrooms in Los Angeles. As of today, there are only eight judges willing to fill them.