Free No Matter How Loud I Shout by Edward Humes

case the precursor of more serious crimes, Carla being just one of countless examples. It is almost impossible to find a juvenile who committed a serious crime today who did not first commit a passel of status offenses. Going after status offenders and putting them under rigorous supervision or even imprisonment proved to be an effective crime prevention tool in juvenile courts nationwide, stopping many kids from committing worse crimes. Carla would have been a perfect candidate.
    But the prosecution of most status offenses ground to a halt in the seventies in California and in many other jurisdictions as well, when laws were adopted that decriminalized them, under the theory that it was unfair to incarcerate kids for behavior that could not get them locked up as adults. 1 In part, this came as a logical extension of the Supreme Court’s Gault decision giving kids the same rights as adults; in part, it seemed a way to save money by cutting back services, particularly by gutting the ranks of probation officers who previously supervised status offenders. The juvenile court can still theoretically prosecute status cases—the statutes are still on the books—but judges have no power to enforce their orders, because kids charged under them generally cannot be locked up like delinquents. The laws are toothless. So, many juvenile courts have dropped the pursuit of status cases, and the desperate parents who had once come to police or prosecutors for help and gotten it are turned away. When Carla turned fifteen, her mother had called the sheriff’s station serving her neighborhood and begged for a deputy to come and arrest her daughter for refusing to go to school or to obey her.
    â€œI’m sorry,” the desk sergeant who took the call had responded. “But unless she commits a crime, there’s nothing we can do. Now, if she does commit a crime, give us a call, we can take a report and get something rolling.”
    Carla’s mother started to say, “But then it will be too late,” but she was speaking to a dial tone. The sergeant had already hung up. Later, when she called the DA’s office, all Peggy Beckstrand could provide was a list of agencies offering counseling services—and advice on how far parents can legally go in disciplining their children before it becomes child abuse. Peggy gets calls asking about that distinction several times a week from parents whose children are out of control. “I wish I could tell you the system can help,” she tells them lamely. “But I can’t. We don’t have the answers.”
    Even when Carla got busted for robbery for taking another girl’s backpack, the system could not help. Carla’s mother had been almost happy when the police called. Finally, she had exclaimed, something would be done, and without her greatest fear being realized—that her girl, or someone else, would get hurt.
    This relief was short-lived, however. The witness in the case—the girl who had reported the crime in the first place—would not cooperate when it came time to go to court, possibly fearing retaliation of some kind. As in adult court, Juvenile Court cases cannot stand on what witnesses tell police—the witnesses have to swear to it personally in court, so Carla could enjoy her constitutional right to face her accuser. It is another legacy of the Gault decision. Peggy’s office had no choice but to drop the case. Carla walked.
    Two months later, she was arrested after police watched her climb out of a stolen Jeep with a couple of other members of Tepa-13, then steal the T-top from another car. Charged with grand theft auto, theft of property, and two counts of receiving stolen property, Carla was released the same day of her arrest after the Probation Department ignored pleas from Carla’s mother that she stay locked up for her own protection. Seven months passed without resolution of the case, a typical delay in