No Matter How Loud I Shout

Dorn is the newly-arrived supervising judge of LA County juvenile courts. Dorn was removed from his position as JC judge five years prior due to his lack of adherence to the letter of the law, which led him to get into a kind of bureaucratic war with defense attorneys and the prosecution alike. Dorn is a controversial character whom Humes argues is a kind of demanding dictator, oscillating between preaching love and sentencing long JH stays for delinquents. Dorn offers an interesting blend of compassion and harshness that leaves him often at odds with other adults in the juvenile system, with the seeming exception of the parents of rebellious teenagers, who reiterate Dorn’s self-conception as a prophet.

Dorn was raised in rural Oklahoma, where he experienced racism first-hand as a black man. He worked his way up, joining the military and eventually becoming a prosecutor. Dorn believes that his past exemplifies how education and discipline can lead to success, in spite of systemic injustice. Humes describes Dorn as being short and portly but with an orator’s voice:

Aside from his booming voice, his most daunting characteristic is a pair of pouchlike cheeks that seem to puff up when he is incensed, a warning sign as unmistakable as the maraca chatter of a rattlesnake […] Dorn has an odd way of getting his way—and dealing with those who would impede his agenda (36-37).

Humes repeatedly associates Dorn with a snake, referring to Dorn’s intense and hooded reptilian stare. Dorn is portrayed as being all about the performance of justice within the courtroom, frequently going on diatribes that mimic his preaching as a church minister on weekends.

More than anything, Dorn represents the conflation of church and state, frequently disregarding the line between law and morality. Dorn’s decisions often demonstrate how the truth exists at odds with the law, frequently leading Dorn to disregard the law in favor for the apparent truth. Humes acknowledges that Dorn’s decisions to disregard the law sometimes have positive consequences: “There is one courtroom that, more often than not, avoids becoming an assembly line, one of the few in Juvenile Court in which postponements do not outnumber other orders from the bench: Judge Roosevelt Dorn’s” (79).

Because Dorn takes the time to carefully consider the issues at hand, he is loath to allow anything within his courtroom to slip into the futility of the juvenile-justice system. In fact, Dorn actively works against any legal ritual, despising the ineptitude and apathy of many of the prosecutors and defense lawyers in the system itself.

However, Dorn is also incredibly arrogant, believing entirely in his own infallibility. This hubris—among other character flaws—play into Dorn’s arbitrary implementation of the law, often with dire consequences for the juvenile caught up in the system. Similarly, Dorn’s perception of morality leads him to thwart the law, which then leads to the conflict between him, the DA, and the defense lawyers, essentially paralyzing the juvenile-justice system and preventing it from supporting the youth and their families. Dorn views himself as the ultimate authority within the courtroom, a belief which is reiterated by Humes, who almost exclusively refers to Dorn either by his last name or as Judge Dorn. As such, Dorn exists as the voice of patriarchal authority within the juvenile-justice system, someone who can alternately be feared, respected, and rebelled against.

Ronald Duncan is a 15-year-old kid who is tried and convicted of murdering his two Baskin-Robbins employers, the Rusitanontas. Duncan is short and squat with a scraggly goatee and alternately infuriates and terrifies the adults around him with his bravado, with the exception of his parents, whom believe wholeheartedly in their youngest son’s claims of innocence. Humes remarks, “as is so often the case with Ronald, I cannot tell if he is serious or joking. The smile almost never goes away” (57).

Duncan is perpetually smiling; he grins and waves to the court during each hearing, only appropriating a solemn façade when chastised by his defense attorney. Beckstrand especially seems to have it out for Duncan, becoming more obsessed with his conviction as she believes, without a doubt, that Duncan is guilty. Humes does not seem to debate this; of all of the kids, he believes Duncan should be punished the most harshly. However, Duncan allegedly committed these murders nine days before his 16th birthday, meaning that he cannot be tried in adult court:

Ronald Duncan, the shotgun killer, can serve no more than eight years, and will probably do less. He can never see the inside of a state penitentiary. After his release, his record will be wiped clean, as if it never existed, the files sealed by state law, so that he can move freely, run for office, own a gun (15).

Humes uses Duncan’s story in order to demonstrate both the futility and the arbitrary nature of the law, contrasting Duncan’s crime and negligible consequences with the harsh penalties faced by Geri Vance, for example. Duncan is used to demonstrate the fact that the law does not account for sociopaths, which Humes and Beckstrand repeatedly argue that Duncan is, allowing monsters to go free while committing to adult prisons kids who had a chance at being saved.

Sixteen Percenters is the name for repeat juvenile offenders based on a recent study that identified that about 16% of juvenile offenders demonstrate recidivism, regardless of the intervention of the juvenile-justice system. These children—like George, Geri, and Carla—demonstrate the futility of the juvenile-justice system, which does not have any impact on whether or not kids continue to commit crimes after getting caught. These children usually demonstrate behavioral problems to begin with, committing petty crimes that are basically ignored by the system. They tend to graduate to committing felonies when they are around 14, at which point the system begins meting out harsh punishments:

Then it is too late for the delinquent, and too late for the people he has victimized. Sometimes through the best of intentions, sometimes through laziness or bureaucratic indifference, the system ends up with kids like Richard Perez, who commit crime after crime until a murder charge stops them (177).

These kids usually come from single-parent homes with family incomes under $20,000 and exhibit drug/alcohol and behavioral problems; more than half of these juveniles join a gang before their first arrest.

Much of the reform being discussed while Humes was writing this book attempted to deal with these recidivist juvenile offenders. Many of the adults within the system have different ways to approach this problem. Beckstrand believes that the juvenile-justice system should be harsher and try more children as adults, in order to lock away these recidivist offenders. On the other hand, Dorn believes that punishing status offenses harshly via required time in camp and parenting classes should help nip this problem in the bud. However, Dorn’s emphasis on punishing status offenses is potentially problematic for children’s civil rights, as it essentially revokes them and also requires familial buy-in, which is often difficult in an over-stressed, single-parent household. In a similar but less punitive vein, Sukoda believes that the State should provide more family counseling programs and after-school activities to give kids an alternative to gang life. There is no guarantee that Sukoda’s ideas will work, and it will cost more upfront; however, Sukoda believes that these programs will save money in the future, because the state will not have as many prisoners it must pay for. Many of the arguments concerning the 16 percenters revolve around money, not social conscience, rendering these kids as qualified numbers. As a group, the 16 percenters represent the often dehumanizing and decontextualizing nature of the juvenile-justice system, suggesting that it does not just need to be reformed but entirely reworked in order to be effective.

Carla is one of the few female juvenile delinquents that Humes focuses on in the book. Humes meets Carla around her fifteenth birthday, although Carla has been involved in the life since she was 13. When Carla was young, her father was killed in a car accident that fractured Carla’s life. Humes does not believe that this justifies Carla’s rebellion, as he repeatedly asserts that she comes from a good and loving family. However, Humes does acknowledge that Carla was closest to her father, which to the audience indicates a potential reason for her teenage rebellion, which occurs once her stepfather moves into the house.

To Humes—and many of the other adults in the book—Carla represents a confusing trend, in which seemingly good kids turn to crime for apparently no reason. However, the audience can clearly speculate many reasons, most of which may fail to be seen by the author as a result of his male privilege. Humes repeatedly talks about Carla’s appearance, including her infectious grin and model-straight teeth, and his heavy emphasis on Carla’s looks can be construed as the author’s apparent sexism. Despite how young Carla is, Humes does not trust her, believing that she has the juvenile-justice system wrapped around her finger, as Carla herself claims. To Humes, Carla represents the bifurcation of this new generation, who are frequently seen by adults as leading two completely different lives. Humes argues: “Within a certain context, Carla is caring, lovable, dependable, and courageous. That this same girl could point a .357 Magnum at somebody and pull the trigger without remorse is the maddening contradiction of Carla James” (47).

Humes cannot understand that Carla’s life is in and of itself a contradiction, especially considering she is a developing young woman—as Humes repeatedly points out—who just wants to be one of the guys. Most of Carla’s rebellion and/or crimes occurs within the context of Carla trying to prove how tough she is, knowing that she has to appear harder than everyone else because she is a woman.

Another way, then, of viewing Carla’s alleged bifurcation is not so much a contradiction as it is the result of her appropriation of a variety of toxic masculinity that upholds violence as a means by which to achieve respect and validation. Humes cannot understand that Carla is code-switching between the two worlds she inhabits: school, where she is expected to achieve scholastic success; and the street, where she can either be violent or the victim of violence. Any seeming bifurcation in personality, therefore, is representative of the social context itself, demonstrating the ways in which the increased violence in environments directly correlates to an increase in violent behavior. Once Carla is forcibly removed from the violence of the street through entrance into Kirby, she sees the possibility of another path, one that can place her out of reach of street violence. 

Geri Vance is:

a handsome teenager with large brown eyes and a receding hairline, a brotherly peacekeeper in the unit, a favorite of both the staff and the other kids in the hall. He is bright and insightful, but there are enormous blind spots in his experience: he has never been to a museum or a baseball game or a public library or a doctor’s office (71).

Unlike many of the other kids within the system, especially the 16 Percenters, Geri seems to be very helpful and respectful of authority figures, in ways that Humes repeatedly contrasts with Carla James’s manipulation, for example. Humes also uses Geri as a kind of foil for Ronald Duncan, considering that both of them have been arrested for murder. However, Humes believes that Geri is being unfairly punished due to the felony murder rule, which holds him completely responsible for his accomplice’s murder during a motel robbery. As previously noted, Humes believes that Ronald is a monster and should receive much harsher punishment than ten years. The differentiation between the cases of Geri and Ronald also serves to show the arbitrary nature of the age distinction between those juveniles who are older—like Geri—and those who are younger—like Ronald—than 16. Geri represents the kids unlucky enough to commit a felony after their sixteenth birthday, and can therefore be tried as adults.

In many ways, Geri is a typical kid in the juvenile-justice system, coming from a troubled familial start. The audience learns most of Geri’s tragic upbringing courtesy of his autobiography, which Humes incorporates in large chunks throughout the book. Geri’s parents both seemed to abuse drugs and his father would repeatedly have sex with prostitutes, eventually giving Geri these much older women. Geri seems to have been co-opted into a life of crime or violence, often explaining that this is the only way he knew how to relate to his environment. As such, Geri serves as a kind of voice for the voiceless kids in the juvenile-justice system, many of whom feel as though no one cares about them. Geri’s autobiography becomes a kind of act of rebellion against the society that would seek to lock him up. He writes to prove that he matters, as Geri equates education and writing with success. By the end of the book, Geri speaks of finishing his autobiography so that he can start his life over with a new beginning, writing a new chapter with a hopeful future. In this way, Geri represents some small success of the writing class, which demonstrated that Geri’s point of view and his words had worth, allowing him to gain the agency to alter his future.