Sister of Mercy

Sister Janet Harris doesn’t hear the shouts from across the grounds at Central Juvenile Hall. She continues walking--her thoughts adrift like a balloon on land wind, carried to waters deep with unfinished paperwork and squalls of dire sequela.

She is rarely still. Shortly after 5 a.m., after a cup of coffee thinned by milk, she often walks a mile. That is when she prays. At 66, her relationship with God is so much a part of her that it isn’t always necessary to talk in order to feel closeness, to express love and faith.

“Usually,” she says, “I just try to listen.”

But this morning she asked God to give her time to catch up on her work as Central’s Catholic chaplain. There are letters to write, telephone calls to return, lawyers to contact. But it becomes apparent as the day unfolds that he must be short-staffed today.

“Sister Janet, Sister Janet.”

Valerie Pincham, a unit supervisor, is shouting and waving her arms. Finally, Sister Janet turns her head, changes course and they meet in the center of the patchy grass.

“I’d like to talk to you about a girl,” Pincham says, her words rushed. “She’s charged with killing her caseworker on a dare. She’s 15, in adult court, looking at a double life sentence. She’s scared to death.”

As chaplain, most of Sister Janet’s duties are administrative, but she and Protestant chaplain Lillie Jackson also handle the daily crises when youths find themselves overwhelmed by the weight of their circumstances and the uncertainty of their futures.

Sister Janet gently places an arm over Pincham’s shoulder as they walk slowly toward the girl’s classroom.

“Her mother passed away when she was 7, her father has been in and out of penitentiary,” Pincham continues. “Can you talk to her?”

*

Sister Janet has been at timeworn Central for six years. Her involvement with troubled youths began in the early 1970s, when she taught at Our Lady of Loretto High School in the Pico-Union area and began working with gang members on some of the city’s toughest streets.

She gained their trust and shared their burdens. Like them, she faced tough decisions.

One day while two sisters were helping her figure out her finances, a young man filled with rage showed up at her door ready, he said, to kill a rival. He asked Sister Janet for money, which she gave him. He asked for a ride, which she also provided. The man used the money and the ride to buy drugs.

“There are hard calls you have to make,” she says. “At the time, my main concern was saving a life, finding a way to keep him from killing somebody.”

Where in her budget, she wondered later, should she write in $40 spent on drugs?

For her work, she has been called a traitor, a disgrace to the church. She has been threatened with death. How could a nun, of all people, be an advocate for those who have done such evil? “Where were you?” asked one mother in court, “when my son was killed?”

Sister Janet is but 5-foot-5, 125 pounds, but her skin is deceivingly thick, her faith infinitely strong. “What sustains me,” she says, “is the sense of God’s love for these young people. I always get a sense that if he were going to hang out anyplace, this is where he would be.”

It is a rare heart that can contain the pain of both victims and criminals. But there is a larger picture, Sister Janet says, beyond the acts in which some people kill and some people die:

“I believe in restorative justice not retributive justice, not looking only at the act, which was hideous, horrible, monstrous, but looking at the other part of the equation. Where is justice done? In punishment? Or is justice holding that person accountable and yet at some point saying he’s not the person he was when he was 16, let’s give him a chance? There are some kids that are very damaged, but I disagree with this focus that we have now of trying them as adults. They’re not adults, they don’t think like adults. They don’t have adult life experiences.”

She has a graceful, halcyon demeanor. Her words reflect compassion and conviction, a poetic and street-smart intelligence. Her smile is comforting and uplifting; and it’s best to keep her smiling, because--you see--she has this other side.

Cops and politicians, Crips and Bloods, Central staff and a bishop or two have seen it, have witnessed her soft blue eyes turning sharp with fury when she believes a person’s rights are being violated.

Sister Janet is critical of politicians who brought about the three-strikes law and lowered the age at which juveniles can be tried as adults for serious crimes. Judges, she says, have lost their discretionary powers to political pressures.

“I know we have to think about security. People need to be kept safe, but do we need to have such draconian punishment? I think we’ve gone berserk. I think politicians know when they talk about crime and punishment there are some good buttons to push. They’ve exploited that at the expense of the youths.”

She is particularly critical of Gov. Pete Wilson. “I’m not in a position to judge his motives, but I certainly disagree with his actions,” she says. “Some of his decisions I think are evil, this new law to try 14- and 15-year-olds as adults, the three strikes . . . I think it’s almost demonic. I think he dances with death.”

There is a framed print on a wall in her South Pasadena home, a sun-filled duplex she rents for $550 a month. It shows a vase filled with roses--in eternal, perfect bloom. All but one are artificial and white. Drooping over the side of the vase is one yellow rose--real and wilted, missing a single petal that has fallen to the floor.

Her life is filled with wilted roses, young people not in perfect bloom and rarely white. And they are as real as the crimes they commit, the tragedy they inflict and endure. They are as real as her workplace, a jail for children, where petals of youth fall to the tiles like bricks.

“What’s important is that they take responsibility for what they did, that they understand what the victims’ families are going through,” she says. “It’s a process of getting them to the truth in their lives.”

There are more than 700 young people at Central awaiting court dispositions. More than 200 are being tried as adults. Luis Gomez was 16 when he was awakened one day by a friend, then set out to rob for money to buy drugs.

He says it was never part of the plan to kill anyone. An accomplice was never charged and now is dead. Gomez was tried as an adult and convicted of murder resulting from robbery. He now is 18 and will awaken early in the morning to be sentenced.

He sits alone in his cell and stares at a wall.

*

Sister Janet often comes to the gardens at Huntington Library to find peace. She strolls among the lilies of the Nile and perfect grass, sits alone in the Zen garden admiring the simplicity of its uncluttered grace and flowing lines that represent the stream of life.

From the time she was a child growing up in New York City, she loved to explore. She delighted in the discovery of parks and theaters and libraries. She remembers a book titled “Yung Fu of the Upper Yangtze.” It was about a young risk-taker, a quality she quickly admired.

Her childhood was steeped in religious imagery, framed by the medieval art of the Cloisters, where she often played. She attended Catholic school and was drawn to her teachers, Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

After World War II, her father, a machinist, and her mother, a homemaker, moved their three children to San Francisco. At 17, Sister Janet entered the Sisters of Presentation, then earned degrees in English and education at the University of San Francisco.

She taught in Catholic schools for 25 years, 16 of them in the Pico-Union area. In 1975, she earned a master’s degree in filmmaking from Loyola Marymount. Her thesis film was about street gangs.

Film and photography served as a means to work with gang members and learn about their world.

While working on one project, a boy came to her with a tiny plant he said he wanted to use in the film, but it was too small. He asked her if she could care for it until it was bigger.

Sister Janet took the plant to the convent at the school where she was teaching and asked Sister Irene if she would plant it in the patio garden. About six months went by and the plant flourished. Sister Irene was proud of the manner in which the plant was saved. One day the school principal asked some students to sweep the patio, where they were stunned at the sight of a monstrous marijuana plant.

“I was going by more love than wisdom. I was a little naive in the beginning,” she says as she sits beneath a canopy of wisteria and listens to trickling water in the Huntington Japanese garden.

In 1974, her volunteer work led to a job with the Los Angeles County Probation Department, which was developing an outreach program to work with gang members. It led to a greater understanding of gang cultures, then to a period of despair. And, eventually, it led to drinking. A glass of wine for dinner became two or three or four.

“I found myself reaching a point of burnout,” she says. “I reached a point where the pain was so great, that drinking became an easy outlet.”

When she realized it had become a problem, she simply stopped and hasn’t had alcohol since.

*

Casey Cohen, now a private investigator, met Sister Janet when he worked as a probation officer. The two of them--he an atheist and she a nun--became close friends and confidantes through their shared commitment to working the streets.

“She looked like a movie star. No one believed she was a nun,” he recalls. “In the beginning I didn’t realize how tough she was. There was a time when we were going to at least one or two funerals a month. I walked into one, and she had pulled the boy’s hand out of the coffin and was clutching it. There was a lot of death.”

The teenager whose lifeless hand she held had once received a standing ovation in a play Sister Janet helped put on. The play was called “My Brother’s Shoes.” And in real life, it was his brother he was trying to save when both were killed.

The pressures, the losses cut deep, and Sister Janet grew weary. In 1980, she transferred to the Bay Area to work in a retreat house. It was an oasis, but it didn’t last. “I thought it was too easy and too cushy,” she says. “It was like being in warm water all the time.”

She left in 1985 to become pastoral associate at a cathedral in San Bernardino, then was hired as coordinator of detention ministry there. “I think the bishop found that I was a little more creative than he wanted me to be,” she says. In the midst of financial cutbacks, the ministry was eliminated in 1989, when she was hired at Central Juvenile Hall.

“Sister Janet is probably the most high-spirited nun I’ve ever known,” says William Burkert, senior director at Central. “As far as being at the edge, the leading edge of how we do our job, she’s probably out there. In fact, sometimes she’s over the edge.”

Burkert says she has been able to connect with young people of all or no faiths: “A lot of them aren’t Catholic, but they attach themselves to Sister Janet. There’s something that transcends whatever religion a person is. It has to do with your attitude about how to deal with kids.”

His feelings about her are not shared by some staff.

“Sister Janet? You mean the one I can’t stand?” asks Joe Sills, a senior detention officer in the KL unit, where those charged with murder are housed. He says it with a smile.

“When she gets upset, she’ll think she can do anything in this building. Some of these guys are murderers, not all of them, but some of them, and man you can’t give them that much love. I basically like all of them, but I’m not giving them that much love.”

Sills remembers an incident in which one of the inmates was not being allowed to attend Mass. Luis Gomez had caused a ruckus on Christmas Day when he sat in the pews behind a member of a gang that had killed his brother.

When Sister Janet found out months later that Gomez was still banned from Mass, she went to get him and confronted Sills. “I should have done it in private,” she says. “I said some things I shouldn’t have said. I was in the wrong.”

Gomez made his first communion at Central, and Sister Janet felt that a seed had been planted. That is the nature of her work, she says, to plant seeds and hope they do not fall upon hard ground.

At the entrance to Huntington’s Zen garden is a zigzag bridge. It is believed that evil spirits travel in straight lines and cannot follow those who enter. It is a place of peace and goodness. Of course, once you leave the garden, and pass over the bridge, evil spirits await.

*

The night before he is to be sentenced, Luis Gomez is visited by Javier Stauring, 34, one of Sister Janet’s 50 or so volunteers. On Wednesday nights, the volunteers talk one-on-one with the youths. After Sunday Mass, there are group discussions.

Stauring trains the new volunteers. “I tell them that the main reason we’re here is to accompany the kids through these rough times, be there for them, show them unconditional love on a consistent basis, which really the great majority of these kids have never felt.”

Stauring and Gomez sit on plastic chairs facing each other in a small interview room.

“How much time you facin’?” Stauring asks Gomez.

“A lot, I don’t really know,” he replies.

“Was it first-degree?”

“First.”

“Was a gun involved?”

“Yeah.”

Gomez says he is not scared: “I already know what they’re going to do. I already know what’s comin’ so it ain’t no surprise.”

Stauring attends Gomez’s sentencing the following day at Superior Court in Norwalk. Gomez sits with his eyes lowered as a woman, the wife of the victim, sobs and asks the judge to give Gomez the death penalty. “My son asked me, ‘Why don’t we just commit suicide?’ ” she tells the court. Their sentence is a lifetime without a loved one, a man gunned down while earning a living. Young Bu Lee was well liked in the community. He was 52 years old.

It was the second robbery Gomez was involved in during a 20-minute stretch. He has no previous felony convictions, but the judge gives Gomez the presumptive sentence, life with no possibility of parole--plus seven years.

Gomez shows no emotion and doesn’t look back at family members as the bailiff leads him away.

That night, Stauring again visits Gomez at Juvenile Hall.

“I talked to your mom,” Stauring says. “She told me to not let you do anything to yourself.”

“I’m all right.”

Gomez throws out his right hand and Stauring grabs it hard and holds it. The two men lean forward in their chairs, their heads next to each other. Both cry.

“Those who love you are still going to be there for you,” Stauring says. “You gotta be strong. A lot of people love you. Ask God to make you strong, man. Put it in his hands. It’s too much for one person.”

*

The following morning, Sister Janet visits Gomez, hugs him. They sit and talk.

“Just don’t worry,” she says. “You still have your appeal.”

“There’s still hope, right?”

“It’s not over until it’s over,” she says.

They talk some more. Gomez describes his childhood, how he used to play football, how he held his older brother as he died in his arms. He had no dreams, he says, but sometimes he would pass a golf course in Venice and wonder what it was like to play.

“I always wanted to play golf,” he says in a quiet voice, his head down.

Then, suddenly, without provocation, he looks into Sister Janet’s eyes.

“He was Catholic,” he says.

“Who was Catholic?”

“The judge. He was Catholic.”

Gomez turns his gaze back to the floor and says no more. Sister Janet doesn’t know what to say. She feels as though she has been stabbed in the chest--not by Gomez, not by the judge but by the complexities of faith and justice and petals that fall hard to the floor.

“Stay strong,” she finally says.

They hug, then she walks away.