No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court.

Fifteen-year-old Tonya Kline had been caught skipping school and shoplifting repeatedly, but it was a burglary attempt that landed the curly-haired blonde before South Carolina Judge Wayne Creech this past December. Instead of the familiar sentencing alternatives, however, Judge Creech opted for a rather novel punishment: Kline would be chained to her mother 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for a month. Kline's offenses are not the worst that teens offer up nor is her punishment the most severe, but the sentence epitomizes the absolute desperation of the juvenile justice system. The fact that her mother had to be hospitalized after three weeks for a drug overdose sparked by the stress of being leashed to her daughter serves as a perversely fitting metaphor: The system, literally at its wit's end, sinks into collapse, giving up long before its charges are ready to.

A new Justice Department study underscores the disturbing increase and severity of juvenile crime. The number of juveniles arrested for serious offense rose from 83,400 in 1983 to 129,600 in 1992; the number of murders committed by teens doubled. Currently, a quarter of all weapons arrests are of teenagers, and the worst is yet to come. The expected bulge in the teenage population presents a "ticking violent crime bomb," the nonpartisan Council on Crime in America recently warned.

It's not surprising that growing panic over an explosion of Clockwork Orange Droogs has sparked competition for the toughest crackdown. Just before Christmas, New York Governor George Pataki proposed new legislation to lengthen juvenile sentences and put more minors in adult prisons. Hawaii is now the only state in the union that treats all kids under 16 as juveniles.

These legal shifts do not result only from political grandstanding; they reflect a transformation in what people believe to be teenagers' very nature. In the past, juvenile delinquents were primarily seen as children temporarily gone astray. If anything, the thrust of the 20th century's juvenile justice system has been to protect 13, 14, or 15-year-olds so that they wouldn't be forever dogged by youthful indiscretions. Now teenagers are seen as scarier, more vicious and more impulsive than adults, capable of serenely blasting someone's head off for wearing the wrong jacket or the wrong expression. The juvenile justice system is returning to a 19th century model in which the crime, not the kid, determines the treatment, and there is diminishing effort to differentiate between youths who are salvageable and those who are not.

Edward Humes tries to capture this crisis in his new book, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Humes has written a moving account of California's juvenile justice system, which is about a step away from collapsing. Humes clearly thinks the system is needlessly discarding worthwhile kids; still, his carefully researched book is difficult to pigeon-hole as conservative or liberal.

In many ways the book reads like a pilot for a Michael Crichton TV series. There's the dedicated prosecutor who stays up all night prepping for a big case in the bathroom so as not to disturb her sleeping husband; the crotchety and idiosyncratic judge who launches a quixotic campaign to reform the system and touches off an internal administrative war; the street-wise probation officer who buys a rundown Jaguar so she can impress her charges that a legit life can payoff. The supporting cast is rounded out by an army of incompetent and insensitive bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges working in an underfunded and overwhelmed system, and, of course, the kids, whose stories careen by in an "ER"-style blur but still manage to touch a nerve. Humes has produced a thoughtful, nuanced work, set apart from the flood of wonkish policy books by his often beautiful prose.

Humes focuses on California's juvenile system, the nation's largest. He introduces us to 15-year-old Ronald Duncan, a skinny five-feet five-inch kid from a middle-class home, with no criminal record, who took a sawed-off shotgun and shot his employers at point-blank range as they were driving him home. The take? A few hundred dollars and revenge for their having "dissed" him. But because Ronald was nine days shy of his 16th birthday the longest sentence he could receive was eight years; he will be set free at 25 no matter what.

While you're still raging at the lunacy of a system that will soon release a monster, you meet Geri Vance. This 16-year-old came from a home where drugs, prostitutes, guns, and bloody beatings were more familiar than "Sesame Street." Apparently forced to participate in a botched motel robbery attempt by two drug-dealing gangsters, Geri ends up getting arrested instead of getting away when he brings his wounded cohort to the hospital.

But Geri had already turned 16. And so despite his determination to reform, his excellent record in juvenile hall, and the fact that he had not fired his gun, he was treated as an adult; that meant he faced potential life imprisonment without parole because his partner died from the gunshot inflicted by one of the potential victims (Geri got lucky: A plea bargain reduced his sentence to 12 years maximum, with much of it served in a youth prison).

Ronald and Geri are two cases that made it through the so-called "Funnel." Although some 2.3 million kids under 18 are arrested in the U.S. in a year, three out of four will walk away as if nothing happened. Their cases will be dismissed because they are too difficult to try or too minor for a system at the brink of a breakdown. The result is that a small core of repeat offenders - in California, 16 percent - account for the majority of crimes committed, but these repeat offenders only receive meaningful punishment when their offenses have progressed to the most serious level. Until then, they are laughing at the system's toothlessness. Humes says an experienced judge can tell how a case will turn out by just looking at the size of a file. "When a file is a sixteen of an inch, it will almost certainly end in probation. A quarter to a half inch, add some time in the hall.... An inch or so in thickness and the likely sentence is one of the county's two dozen juvenile camps. And over two inches, the kid is probably a Sixteen Percenter."

The system is trapped between two often contradictory mandates: to punish and to heal. Even for those kids who have a good chance of being rehabilitated, there are achingly few facilities with the necessary counseling and educational services or enough competent probation officers to haul kids back when they step out of line. Experienced prosecutors and judges agree that the best chance of turning a kid around is way before age 13, when he is just starting to cut school or brought in for a very minor first offense. Yet the system ignores these cases, instead expending its resources on the worst offenders.

Very early prevention programs for kids who fit the high-risk profile can produce positive results. (The Big Brother/Big Sister program, for instance, dramatically reduced youths' school absenteeism, assaults, and first-time drug use.) And when those fail, predictable and meaningful punishment must be promptly delivered to transgressors. But enthusiasm for gutting the juvenile courts outweighs support for reforming them. Treating all juveniles as adults would take care of the Ronald Duncans and is a far easier sell; money for jails and cops is more readily available than for squishy prevention programs for kids who cut school, even though the latter may prove more cost-effective in the long run. But this approach means discarding a mind-numbing number of kids who have the potential to be saved.

Humes is clearly frustrated that tough-guy rhetoric overpowers the talk of reform. But his approach has unresolved paradoxes as well. The juvenile system's shorter penalties, for example, encourage older criminals to enlist juveniles in crimes. Sometimes there is a trade-off between punishment and rehabilitation. And, as Humes acknowledges, a child's moral sensibility is well-established by the preteen years. That means that attempts to turn around teenagers are more formidable. The California Department of Justice found that whether a juvenile offender was sent home or sent through the juvenile justice system's full range of services, the recidivism rates were exactly the same. Probation, alternative incarceration, or juvenile hall didn't seem to make a bit of difference.

The cruel realities of juvenile courts and electoral politics may lead to a conclusion that we're loath to accept: There's only a small lifeboat, and our best hope may be to concentrate on the youngest generation when they first show signs of high-risk behavior and abandon hopes of saving teens already working their way through the funnel. As it is, we have a juvenile justice system that does too little to rehabilitate when there is still a chance to save kids - and too little to punish when there is not.