Juvenile Justice : A Measured Look Inside the Wasteland : NO MATTER HOW LOUD I SHOUT: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court,<i> By Edward Humes (Simon & Schuster: $24, 389 pp.)</i>

“Who Am I?”

Take a trip in my mind

see all that I’ve seen,

and you’d be called a

beast, not a human being . . .

. . . there’s

not much I can do,

there’s no way out, my

screams have no voice no

matter how loud I shout . . .

I could be called a

low life, but life ain’t

as low as me. I’m

in juvenile hall headed

for the penitentiary.

George Trevino, age 16

****

Los Angeles boasts the world’s largest juvenile court system with a maze of 11 courthouses, 49 courtrooms conducting 150,000 delinquency hearings each year and administering 80,000 active cases. It is a place that is more purgatory than hell, in which struggling attorneys push uphill against an ever-growing boulder of case loads, a world in which some probation officers and judges pack guns to protect themselves from juveniles.

Armed with a court order, which gave him unprecedented and unrestricted access to juvenile court, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes guides us through this world in which mediocrity, incompetence, pervasive frustration and apathy are often hidden behind the convenient cloak of juvenile confidentiality. Now a contributing editor to Buzz Magazine, Humes won the Pulitzer in 1989 for his reporting in the Orange County Register (where he was on staff from 1984 to 1989). In this book, he brings his exemplary skills as an investigative journalist to bear, dispelling stereotypes of teens committing drive-bys and other mayhem that routinely make the evening news.

With one incisive set of facts, Humes gets to the heart of the system’s problem by revealing the results of a Probation Department study of repeat offenders (“referred to by Juvenile Court insiders as the 16% Solution”) that has yet to be made public: “A little over half--57%--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%, to be precise--get arrested one or two more times, then they, too, end their criminal careers. But the last 16%--that’s 16 kids out of every 100 arrested--commit a total of four or more crimes ranging from theft to murder.”

The study also shows that the system has little or no effect on whether a kid goes straight or becomes a career criminal. And the bottom line remains that the bulk of the juvenile justice system’s resources is spent on that small but busy 16%.

If “No Matter How Loud I Shout” were merely an expose, it would be limited to a dizzying compilation of lost youth. At first glance, seeing Los Angeles through the prism of Juvenile Court provides a dystopian vision of a city way beyond the edge, a film noir, with 15-year-olds committing shotgun murders, kids getting killed for stereo equipment and parents pleading with judges to keep their children. Humes’ story, told with the drama and beauty of a novel, transcends this sometimes harsh reality by letting us hear the voices of youth who come alive in the juvenile hall writing class that he teaches.

In this way, the writer succeeds in humanizing youth who are thought of and come to think of themselves as monsters. Giving a voice to silence, the writing classes become cathartic experiences that offer opportunity for self and mutual affirmation. Reading together while waiting for their court dates or sentences, the youth have only each others’ voices as comfort. Oddly, this uses the energy that binds gangs in a more constructive way. Hearing their stories reveals the sense of despair one must feel to do desperate things and provides the context out of which many lost lives are forged. George Trevino writes:

Should I care about you,

do you care about me?

Should I care about a person,

that I’ve never seen?

Should I care about mom,

who left me alone?

Should I care about a dad,

that I’ve never known?

Should I care about a sister,

I never really knew--who died on Christmas Day?

Should I care about my uncle,

Who died of AIDS ‘cause he was gay?

I guess I should, but I don’t,

if you were to die, you’d think I’d care,

no I won’t

“Sociopaths are made, not born,” says Sharon Stegall, a probation officer Humes profiles. “In children, the results are frightening--kids who not only have no concept of right and wrong, but who don’t care.”

Stegall and a dedicated minority of prosecutors, public defenders, judges and volunteers, those who bother to listen to the youth in their custody, find themselves not combating crime so much as fighting an almost religious crusade to show kids that their lives really matter and consequently so do their actions. “Sharon’s probationers . . . tell her all the time that it doesn’t matter what they do, because they are, in essence, dead already. And this hopelessness, this living death, does not stop in the barrios and ghettos--she and her colleagues hear the same thing from the rich suburban kids, from children of privilege, even from the sons of two Juvenile Court bench officers.”

In that vein, it is fitting that Humes spends a great deal of time profiling Judge Roosevelt Dorn, “minister of God, whose self-appointed mission is nothing less than rescuing the system, one kid at a time.” With a pistol strapped to his waist, Dorn is a teacher, philosopher, bully and charmer who is against sending kids to adult court, who advocates prosecuting status offenses, such as truancy. “Go to school or go to jail is the alternative he offers.” Parents love Dorn because he opens his chambers to them for informal visits with their errant children. “The public has no idea how important this court is, or the shocking and deplorable conditions that exist in these courthouses. . . . I want to educate them,” says Dorn.

But the district attorney and public defender’s offices bristle at him cutting legal corners to suit his own mission. They react to Dorn as a man who wants to be a king more than a judge. And through Dorn’s idiosyncrasies we learn how each courtroom is shaped more by the personality of the judge than by the intent of the law.

Even when the various branches of Juvenile Court are at war with each other or when otherwise stable professionals are on the verge of writing their resignation letters, Humes shows that there are individuals and programs that succeed in spite of scant resources and little or no recognition.

There is Sherry Gold, a defense attorney who earns about $45 an hour from the court and a maximum of $2,500 per case (a comparatively low salary for her field). She finds the time to do her own investigation of crime scenes and in one case saves a teen from being mistakenly prosecuted for murder in adult court.

There is Sister Janet Harris, chaplain of juvenile hall, who spends each day roaming the units as a friend to all. She recruits volunteers, organizes dances, plans church services and Bible study groups and finds alternative lawyers and social workers “for kids who have little contact with the professionals who represent them.”

And there’s the Rosewood School, where delinquents work with disabled children and attend classes. There, Andre, a 16-year-old who could steal a car in 46 seconds at age 13, now helps to walk and dress children like Miriam, who uses a wheelchair. “Arrests, detention, probation, and camp hadn’t put a dent in [Andre’s] destructive course. Going to this school that forced delinquents to care for disabled children had been an afterthought. No experts or studies or committees had produced the program--it had been cobbled together by two dedicated teachers sick of failure and bureaucracy, and who sensed power in this melding of one child’s helplessness with another’s lack of purpose.”

Aside from providing ample evidence that the juvenile justice system does not work in its present form, Humes is not as intent on providing a recipe for its rehabilitation or destruction as he is on opening up new perspective to contemplate the problem. Instead of focusing exclusively on the grisly (as is so often done), he continually strives to give context to the often narrow parameters of crime and punishment. Even when a 15-year-old murderer gets sent away for as long as the law allows, the readers get the queasy feeling that in this realm of justice there are no winners.

Humes succeeds where many would have failed because he is working out of the best American tradition of nonfiction narrative, of literary journalism, by paying homage to practitioners of the craft such as John McPhee, Joan Didion, Richard Rhodes and Tom Wolfe. Instead of the dizzy hype of kids on the rampage, his voice is calm, his gaze, steady, and his prose, spare, especially in extreme situations. This combination serves to convey the subtlety and vulgarity of a situation without telling the reader how to think or feel.