No Matter How Loud I Shout

Many of the juvenile characters within the narrative seem to have their own preordained fate that they cannot break free from. Humes first introduces fate with the harrowing story of Geri Vance, who:

is bright and personable, with a sad history that began when he was abused and neglected as a child, left to roam the streets and accumulate a record of minor crimes […] His fate had been sadly predictable, almost preordained, the Intake Officer figures (14).

Humes’s reference to Geri’s fate negates the complicity of the juvenile-justice system, which has arguably watched Geri’s criminal behavior escalate without stepping in to stop it. It removes the system from culpability, just as the idea of fate removes the intake officer, the author, and even the reader from any responsibility for Geri’s fate. However, another argument is that all of society is culpable in Geri’s increased criminality, as society looked on with either ignorance or apathy while Geri escalated. This neglect directly allowed for Geri to be associated with the drug dealers who eventually forced him to rob a motel, leading to his current incarceration.

However, the weight of fate always seems to rest on the shoulders of the kids themselves, who are far too young to deal with this burden. Sometimes fate does benefit the kids, however, as in the case of Carla. Police officers happen to see her gang tattoo, which ultimately leads to her getting arrested and going straight. For the vast majority of these kids, however, fate does not have a positive connotation.

Rather, many of these kids believe their fate to be already sealed, equating their futures with their impending doom:

Sharon’s probationers—like the kids Sister Janet meets in the hall—tell her that all the time, that it doesn’t matter what they do, because they are, in essence, dead already. And this hopelessness, this living death, does not stop in the barrios and ghettos—she and her colleagues hear the same things from the rich suburban kids (209).

These kids already feel dead; there is a kind of hopelessness at this idea of fate that seems to transcend socio-economic barriers, as though this fatalistic belief has infected every person of this generation. Humes constructs this belief in fate as being inherently different from those of the preceding generations, repeatedly asserting that this fatalistic viewpoint separates this generation from the criminality of the previous ones. However, Humes does not stop to question where this fatalism stems from, as juvenile morbidity rarely results from the kids themselves but rather arises within environments of neglect.

Much of the narrative concerns the voices of the kids themselves, which Humes showcases through the juveniles’ writing. Even the title of the work hearkens back to the idea of voices, namely that the kids feel like they are voiceless, or shouting from inside of some kind of void:“The kids don’t often get a chance to talk to someone with real power. There are their judges, of course, but they are viewed as robed symbols far beyond reach, ‘looking down on me like some great white god’” (164).

The kids want to be heard and often feel like they are not. In this way, Humes’s writing class provides these kids with some kind of voice, some kind of agency that forces people to listen to them. They are able to separate themselves from the anonymity necessitated by the legalese of the juvenile-justice system; even though their narratives or their poems are similar in some ways, they are also distinctly unique. Within the writing class, Humes demonstrates the important catharsis that writing and especially writing about trauma can have on juveniles, who so often feel at the mercy of powers much greater than themselves. Within the relative safety of the writing class, kids like Stranger are able to explore their own thoughts and hear their ideas verbalized to a rapt audience, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Within this finding of one’s own voice, there is so much positive power that even this small step seems enough to propel some kids forward in a more beneficial direction.

The Thurgood Marshall Branch is the juvenile court division of the LA County superior court in Inglewood, California. It is the setting of this book and sets the mood for the overall tone and plot trajectory of the narrative. The buildings themselves are decrepit and in bad need of repairs, with bathrooms so covered in graffiti that one can’t see their own reflection in the mirror. When Dorn arrives early to his first day of work, he is horrified to find the dilapidated nature of the court system, which both he and Humes feel represents a metaphor for the juvenile justice system itself. Humes writes:

The setting fuels this sense of futility: This courthouse is a grim place […] The courthouse occupies the sort of neighborhood where members of warring black and Hispanic gangs summon each other by beeper and cellular phone to drive-by shootings and schoolyard race riots […] yet this is also the kind of neighborhood where wealthy Angelenos regularly park their BMWs and Mercedeses (33).

Here, readers witness the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots that the kids are subjected to every day. When the kids see the dingy nature of the courtroom, they find it hard to respect the adults who work there, considering gangster life seems much more flashy and appealing. Dorn and Humes—among other adults—both argue at various times that these kids cannot possibly respect an institution which clearly has no respect for itself. Both Humes and Dorn are very clearly proponents of the problematic broken-windows theory, which asserts that places that are run-down are more likely to generate and/or tolerate crime.

The courtroom itself exists not just as the decrepit embodiment of social neglect; it also exemplifies the desolation, conflict, and limbo-like feeling that the entire juvenile-justice system represents:

The dingy courtroom with its cracked linoleum and sighing water cooler is still filled with parents, children, babies scrabbling and being shushed, surly teenagers with enormously baggy pants and tattoos snaking across their knuckles or up their arms, police officers sitting with arms crossed, knowing they will wait all day to testify in cases that will almost certainly be continued to another day, crime victims warily eyeing the juveniles accused of victimizing them (75).

The building seems infected with the same confusion and fear that plagues society, in respect to the juvenile-justice system. Humes notes that there is no logic to the layout of the building and everything smells like urine, with elevators that don’t work and no clear signs delineating where people should be. The building is, in essence, the futility of bureaucracy made tangible. Further, the entire building is unbelievably loud and chaotic, as referenced in the previous quotation, which only exacerbates  the general state of confusion that all people who enter the building are left in. Similarly, Humes presents the building as the castoff of the adult system: it used to be an old adult courthouse but was converted into Juvenile Court. In this way, the courthouse again reflects the juvenile-justice system itself.