Book Reveals Dark Side of Juvenile Justice

By following Edward Humes’ footsteps through the Los Angeles County juvenile courts and jails, we can time travel back to the 19th century.

That’s the path Humes takes us on in his powerful new book, “No Matter How Loud I Shout,” about a year in the life of a “broken, battered, outgunned” L.A. County juvenile justice system. It is a system, he says, that is returning to older, crueler times when children were imprisoned with adults and even executed.

Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, tells the story in a very human way, chronicling the lives of seven young offenders as they pass through an overcrowded, exhausted system where caprice decides on punishment or freedom, success or failure.

This information is pretty much new to me just as it will be to nearly everyone else. Juvenile Court is held behind closed doors. Journalists don’t cover these trials except for rare big cases. Members of the public seldom give it a thought unless their children or those of friends or relatives wind up charged with a crime.

So it was with a sense of admiration that I drove to Humes’ hometown, Seal Beach, last week to interview a reporter who got a story that any serious journalist would have loved to have written.

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We met in a restaurant on Main Street, near the beach. Hume reminded me of a lot of reporters I know, cautious, outwardly friendly but a bit reserved, conservative about revealing much about himself. He seemed to be a “just the facts” kind of guy and I wondered how he could have written such an emotionally powerful book.

First of all, he was a rare writer who got inside the courts, obtaining a court order admitting him to the hearings, closed because early 20th century reformers felt that the best way to rehabilitate young offenders was to handle their cases in an informal, confidential manner.

What really makes this such an affecting book is that Humes permitted himself to become part of the story, breaking the emotional barrier that separates journalists from their subjects. Perhaps it was when he met Sister Janet Harris, the chaplain at L.A.’s Central Juvenile Hall. Told she knew everything about the Juvenile Court and jail system, he called upon her for help. She agreed, if he’d go to work in the Juvenile Hall, teaching a writing course.

She gave him the toughest kids, among them killers and robbers. She figured they needed Humes’ help the most. “They were so kid-like,” Humes told me. “They seemed so ordinary to me.”

Some deserve worse than what they got, like the teenage killer of a husband and wife who employed him at their Baskin-Robbins shop. He’ll probably be freed from the California Youth Authority at the age of 25. But the killers and the unredeemables are only about 16% of the juvenile court caseload, Humes wrote. A reformed system, he noted, with more and better people running it, would save many more of the young offenders.

One of the salvageable was a boy Humes calls George Trevino. Abandoned by his mother at the age of 6, made a ward of the court, he moved from one foster home to another and was shuttled among troubled, abusive relatives. He continually was in trouble with the law, ending up arrested for participating in a home invasion robbery.

In the writing class, Humes saw promise in the young man, where he showed insight in a poem: “Take a trip in my mind, see all that I’ve seen and you’d be called a beast, not a human being.”

George was tried as an adult person.Humes, no longer the objective reporter, joined Sister Harris in fighting the sentence. They lost, but George was overwhelmed by the support. He went to the Youth Authority, and may be out before he is 25. “A new fragile optimism creeps briefly into his poetry,” Humes said.

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Law and order hard-liners will see no reason for optimism in youths such as George. Ever tougher penalties are their answer.

As the debate becomes more furious, heated by an increasing juvenile population, the hard-liners will urge a retreat to the past. Edward Humes, emerging from the system after a year as a reporter, a teacher and finally an advocate, makes a powerful witness for the other side.