Article archive / December 2018
Originally published: . Volume 9, No. 12. Source pages: 15.
A book I read this year which I found particularly timely and thought-provoking was No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court (Simon & Schuster), by Edward Humes, written in 1996, with an update in 2015.
The author is a journalist who taught a writing class in the Los Angeles juvenile justice system, which is the subject of the book. In the 1990s juvenile crime had been rising, and all experts were predicting (wrongly) that there would be an explosion of violent juvenile crime in the years to come due to ever-increasing numbers of what were termed "superpredators". There was clearly far too little justice in the juvenile justice system, with a great many cases never being pursued at all, or prosecuted only after lengthy delays and wholesale plead-downs, with inadequate followup by overworked probation officers. The quality of legal defense was remarkably poor for the most part. A critical factor for many juvenile offenders was the calendar. Was the offense committed before the defendant's sixteenth birthday, or after? In the latter case trial as an adult could be expected, with correspondingly more severe penalties.
The book looks at the issues through the eyes of police, probation officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, victims, and defendants. Regardless of whatever mostly-ineffectual measures were implemented to get juvenile offenders back on the right path, about 16% would go on to commit serious, repeat offenses. Should the system focus on early- intervention measures to help prevent this escalation, or concentrate on identifying and removing from society the sixteen percent who would become major offenders? The afterword provides some basis for very cautious optimism, with lower-than-expected crime rates, and with some young offenders making good in spite of their circumstances, and of themselves. But there is no mistaking how big a problem juvenile justice is in the United States. A disturbing and thought-provoking book.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.