Scared Straight

Every move Julius Jikutz made screamed danger.

Burly, bearded and covered with swastikas and racist tattoos, the 37-year-old parolee stood over a group of juvenile delinquents and sneered.

“You think you’ve got a crazy life now?” he barked. “You’ll get a crazy life [in prison]. . . . You obviously want it because you’re here.”

Minutes before, they were sullen teenage boys and girls with bad attitudes sitting with their parents in Orange County Superior Court.

After an evening in a jail cell, being yelled at by former and current prison inmates and getting a grilled by a deputy district attorney, the 15 Shortstop program enrollees were just a bunch of scared kids.

Since 1980, the juvenile diversion program has worked to show first-time offenders the consequences of a life of crime and help mend fences between parent and child.

It is an evening spent painting a grim picture of the future, then another session that demands words of encouragement and positive reinforcement from parents and their children, ages 9 to 17.

“By this time, kids aren’t listening to the parents, communication has broken down, and it’s hard for them to find anything pleasant to say about each other,” said Jane Martin, executive director of the Orange County Bar Foundation, which sponsors the program. “This program is a wake-up call.”

The program, which started here and is operated with about $400,000 in private donations annually has been adopted elsewhere, from Long Beach to Pocatello, Idaho. On Monday, Shortstop will expand within Orange County, adding Municipal Court in Fullerton to its Santa Ana court location.

Run by judges and attorneys, parents pay $100 for the program. Children who take part generally have only one or two minor offenses. Shoplifting is the most common crime.

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The evening starts in a Santa Ana courtroom. Two older boys yawn and smile as rock music punctuates a short video about life in prison.

After a short introduction from Deputy Dist. Atty. Victor Quiros, the kids are led to holding cells.

There, they are stripped of their valuables and anything that can be used as a weapon. A young man wearing baggy clothes who has given up his belt clutches his pants to keep them up. Then the children are assigned numbers, and for the rest of the night, those numbers are their identities.

Crowded with parents and children, the floor of the small holding cell is covered with food from the inmates who stayed there that day. The youths are told to keep their hands behind their backs, as if they were shackled.

A hard-nosed guard from the California Youth Authority speaks about life behind bars. He is followed by a CYA inmate who challenges the hardest cases in the group.

“You better wake up. Playtime is over,” he said. “You’re not watching TV. You guys cry about your mommies making you be home at certain times. Just wait until you come” to the CYA.

After listening quietly from the side, Jikutz steps forward, taking off his T-shirt and twisting his baseball cap backward. He’s wearing a tank top that exposes his massive, tattooed arms.

Face impassive, he portrayed the penitentiary as a violent world where racism is a way of life, lacing his talk with obscenities.

Looking at a group that included kids of all races, he told them “there are no racial lines in prison, there are racial walls.”

He described beating a cellmate “to see if he had heart.” Jikutz said the man had blood in his urine while he was in the infirmary for five days. “Nobody cared.”

Twenty minutes later, alone in the hallways outside the courtroom, Jikutz exhaled his tension in a great burst of breath.

“It hurts to see these kids like this,” said Jikutz, who is on parole for possession of a firearm, working and attending community college, “but you know that people like me are the only ones they are going to listen to. They’ll ignore their parents and the cops, but me, they believe.”

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Reality therapy worked for one Yorba Linda boy, a 9-year-old known as No. 2, who took checks from mailboxes.

“What scared me is that when he was arrested, he wasn’t afraid,” said his mother. “That’s one of the reasons he was referred to this program.”

After listening to Jikutz, the child sat quietly in a chair, hands disappearing into his sleeves, eyes tearing. “I don’t want to be like that,” he said haltingly. “It scared me.”

Single and with two other kids, his mother said the program was “brutally awakening and gave a sense of true consequences. . . . My son was not a bad kid, but he was talking to older kids and was getting the attitude. I wanted him to be afraid of consequences. Now I have a great amount of hope.”

Once given a taste the penal system, the children are shown “how to take back control of their life,” said Quiros.

Parents and children were assigned to write about their experiences in the program and scheduled to come back for a second session in two weeks.

At this meeting, parents are told to express what is good about their child, no negativity allowed. Children are asked to express their goals.

“This is a session of healing,” said Martin, who has worked with Shortstop for 11 years. “We ask them to plan for their lives. . . . The parents also have to be willing to spend time with them.”

Jikutz said it took him years to deal with his anger and racial intolerance, time that he wishes he had back.

“A program like this, it might have made the difference for me.”