No Matter How Loud I Shout Read Online Free Page B

troubled kids work three out of four times, but at age thirteen, when the success rate is down to one out of four. Not that it mattered. Such measures of failure and success assume someone actually makes an effort with a kid. But the number of cases like Richard’s has become too overwhelming in recent years—annually, more than 5,300 auto thefts are committed by juveniles in LA—and the Juvenile Court, busy with more serious crimes, cannot keep up. With priority given to the 237 homicides, 3,746 robberies, 5,621 burglaries, 675 sexual crimes, 3,374 felonious assaults, 6,044 drug crimes, and 2,412 weapons possession offenses—all committed by juveniles in LA in a single year 1 —a mere car theft, like the thousands of graffiti cases that fill the court dockets, goes to the end of the line.
    And so, Richard was released the day he was arrested. Five months passed before he was summoned back to court to face his charges. During that time, he ignored a court order to attend school, to obey his parents, and to quit his gang. He figured no one from Juvenile Court would have the time to check, and he was right. He capped off his show of contempt by failing to appear for his thrice-delayed trial. “I knew they couldn’t do shit to me,” he would later observe. “I was havin’ too much fun to bother.”
    A month later, the young fugitive was rearrested and brought into court, where he cut a deal and pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of joyriding. His single mother said she was sick of his foul mouth and gangster friends. “You keep him,” she told the judge. He got probation, lived for a while in a group home, then went home with his father.
    From the moment he settled his case, Richard busted curfew nightly, got high, and continued gangbanging, all in violation of his probation conditions. But his probation officer had nearly two hundred kids to supervise, which she accomplished primarily by talking to them on the telephone once a month (twice a month for the troublesome kids). She didn’teven catch the phony address and disconnected phone number Richard had supplied as his father’s—until Richard’s dropping out of the ninth grade provoked her to actually try and visit him. No one in the system had checked on his home life before releasing him. The PO found an empty lot where his house was supposed to be.
    Richard remained a fugitive for another month, when police caught him behind the wheel of another stolen car. Released again after a few hours in custody, he stayed on probation and landed back in the same group home, conveniently located near his gang turf.
    Three months later, Richard and three other members of a new, violent street gang he had joined, called the Young Crowd, started a riot at a hospital. Intent on visiting a homeboy with a gunshot wound, they had tussled with security guards rather than wait fifteen minutes for official visiting hours to begin. “I’ll be back, I’ll do a drive-by, I’ll kill your motherfuckin’ asses,” Richard shrieked to the guards and the nurses who turned him out. A new judge took over his case, kept him on probation, and returned him to the same group home with the same no-gangs, go-to-school conditions he had yet to obey.
    Six months later, in August 1993, Richard, by then sixteen, was arrested for participating in a swarming attack on a motorist who stopped near a park on the gang’s turf, only to be beaten badly, his car stolen. After his arrest, Richard sat in court in bold gang style—a kind of Charlie Chaplin positioning of his feet under the defense table—as derogatory a gesture in his universe as extending his middle finger at the judge. But no one noticed or cared. The result: case dismissed, more probation, same group home. Richard celebrated by having his gang moniker, “Shorty,” tattooed onto his back, and by breaking a middle-aged woman’s nose with one