Read Online No Matter How Loud I Shout by Edward Humes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Edward Humes
Ads: Link
what is right and wrong. And if you didnât know them, you didnât belong there in the first place.â
No one had to tell Carla what to do when members of another gang drove by and peppered a group of Tepa homeboys with bullets, wounding one kid, Carlaâs friend (who recovered, killed a sixteen-year-old boy in revenge, and went to the Youth Authority). âHe was my dog. He was mytight. I ran the streets with him. I had to do something.â It was Carla who grabbed a gunâthere were always guns, communal property passed from gang member to gang memberâand who headed to a car with another girl and a homeboy. The guy tried to take the gun from her, but Carla refused. âIf Iâm going to do a drive-by, Iâm going to do the shooting,â she would later explain, as if discussing the advantages of playing left field over right field in baseball. âIf weâre going to get caught, you know, I want to get caught doing something worthwhile. Not some chickenshit murder charge just because Iâm sitting in the car when the gun went off. Why go down for that? Might as well do the shooting.â
Carla claims she shot someone that day, though friends wonder if this is mere boastfulness. She says the boy who was struck survived and recovered. She was never caught or charged with this crime, though she almost died that day. After emptying her revolver at a crowd of rival gang members, a barrage of bullets slapped into the car inches from her as they sped off. The other girl in the car crossed herself, thanking the Virgin Mary for protecting them, but it had never occurred to Carla that she would be struck down. She still doesnât really believe itâs possibleâCarla says she is too smart to be killed. After the drive-by, she stayed out all that night with a small garrison of gang members, hunkered down outside a homeboyâs house, waiting for a retaliation that never came. Then she went home, showered, and went to school. Feeling calm, justified, moral, honorable. And thrilled.
She was at the time one month shy of her fifteenth birthday.
Carla still put on a good front at school, still was capable of excelling when she wanted to, still worked extra hours in the office to curry favor, though now it was as much to cover her new deficiencies in class as anything else, the result of more time on the corner, less with the books. At home, the pretense slipped away. She openly defied her mother, she treated her stepfather with studied rudeness, she refused to observe anything like a curfew, much less quit her gang associations. She stayed out for days at a time. The counselor at her middle school who had befriended her tried to help, seeing the girlâs future withering daily, but she was as powerless as Carlaâs parents to stop the running away, the truancy, the refusal to obey.
In years past, Juvenile Court routinely reined in children like Carla early on, before they committed any serious crimes. Running away, incorrigibility, truancyâthey are known as âstatus offenses,â because they affect only a person whose status is as a minor, a child. Part of the logic used atthe turn of the century to justify creating a separate juvenile court, and to stop imprisoning ten-year-olds side-by-side with forty-year-olds, lay in the acknowledgment that children are different from adults and therefore should be held to different standards. Not only would the sentences be different, but the offenses themselves would stand apart, too. Under that theory, running away or disobeying oneâs parents or skipping school could be crimes in a juvenile court, even though adults could not be prosecuted for identical conduct. Indeed, such offenses made up the bulk of juvenile court cases during the first half of the twentieth century. And as public policy, it makes perfect sense, because the experts knew in 1905, as they do now, that this sort of misbehavior is in virtually every
No one had to tell Carla what to do when members of another gang drove by and peppered a group of Tepa homeboys with bullets, wounding one kid, Carlaâs friend (who recovered, killed a sixteen-year-old boy in revenge, and went to the Youth Authority). âHe was my dog. He was mytight. I ran the streets with him. I had to do something.â It was Carla who grabbed a gunâthere were always guns, communal property passed from gang member to gang memberâand who headed to a car with another girl and a homeboy. The guy tried to take the gun from her, but Carla refused. âIf Iâm going to do a drive-by, Iâm going to do the shooting,â she would later explain, as if discussing the advantages of playing left field over right field in baseball. âIf weâre going to get caught, you know, I want to get caught doing something worthwhile. Not some chickenshit murder charge just because Iâm sitting in the car when the gun went off. Why go down for that? Might as well do the shooting.â
Carla claims she shot someone that day, though friends wonder if this is mere boastfulness. She says the boy who was struck survived and recovered. She was never caught or charged with this crime, though she almost died that day. After emptying her revolver at a crowd of rival gang members, a barrage of bullets slapped into the car inches from her as they sped off. The other girl in the car crossed herself, thanking the Virgin Mary for protecting them, but it had never occurred to Carla that she would be struck down. She still doesnât really believe itâs possibleâCarla says she is too smart to be killed. After the drive-by, she stayed out all that night with a small garrison of gang members, hunkered down outside a homeboyâs house, waiting for a retaliation that never came. Then she went home, showered, and went to school. Feeling calm, justified, moral, honorable. And thrilled.
She was at the time one month shy of her fifteenth birthday.
Carla still put on a good front at school, still was capable of excelling when she wanted to, still worked extra hours in the office to curry favor, though now it was as much to cover her new deficiencies in class as anything else, the result of more time on the corner, less with the books. At home, the pretense slipped away. She openly defied her mother, she treated her stepfather with studied rudeness, she refused to observe anything like a curfew, much less quit her gang associations. She stayed out for days at a time. The counselor at her middle school who had befriended her tried to help, seeing the girlâs future withering daily, but she was as powerless as Carlaâs parents to stop the running away, the truancy, the refusal to obey.
In years past, Juvenile Court routinely reined in children like Carla early on, before they committed any serious crimes. Running away, incorrigibility, truancyâthey are known as âstatus offenses,â because they affect only a person whose status is as a minor, a child. Part of the logic used atthe turn of the century to justify creating a separate juvenile court, and to stop imprisoning ten-year-olds side-by-side with forty-year-olds, lay in the acknowledgment that children are different from adults and therefore should be held to different standards. Not only would the sentences be different, but the offenses themselves would stand apart, too. Under that theory, running away or disobeying oneâs parents or skipping school could be crimes in a juvenile court, even though adults could not be prosecuted for identical conduct. Indeed, such offenses made up the bulk of juvenile court cases during the first half of the twentieth century. And as public policy, it makes perfect sense, because the experts knew in 1905, as they do now, that this sort of misbehavior is in virtually every
Similar Books
