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erupt here hourly, and they disappear into a courtroom together. They pass without a glance a deputy public defender huddled on a bench with the mother of a mentally ill girl who has been charged with attempted murder after voices in her head instructed her to attack her sister with a machete. The mother is crying and shaking her head as the young lawyer explains why it will be difficult to keep the girl from being transferred to the harsh confines of adult court, due to the severity of the accusations against her and the fact that she is past sixteen years of age. “She really needs help and belongs here in Juvenile, and I’ll do everything I can to make that happen,” the lawyer says. “But the problemis, the law is very tough on cases like this. The best I can do today is try for a continuance. The district attorney holds all the cards.”
    It is a peculiarity of Juvenile Court that two such contradictory conversations can occur here simultaneously and with total sincerity. This is because each side in the process—the prosecutors, the defenders, the judges, the cops and probation officers, the crime victims, the kids on trial here and their families—sees itself as being on the one and only losing side. When a case ends in Juvenile Court, it is often hard to tell just who has won.
    The setting fuels this sense of futility: This courthouse is a grim place. The gray concrete box that is the Thurgood Marshall Branch of Los Angeles’s massive Juvenile Court squats next to a once graceful garden district in the city of Inglewood, a community now so profoundly distressed that parents, policemen, and civic leaders meet monthly to plot safe routes through gang turf for their schoolchildren. The courthouse occupies the sort of neighborhood where members of warring black and Hispanic gangs summon one another by beeper and cellular phone to drive-by shootings and schoolyard race riots. Three blocks from Marshall Branch, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl sporting eleven prominent gang tattoos was caught distributing flyers advertising a gang-sponsored drug, sex, and beer party. The computer-generated flyers promised “Hoochies that ram free” can enter for free—meaning young girls who provide sex on demand need not worry about the five-dollar cover charge, a deal the eleven-year-old happily promoted to her sixth-grade schoolmates. When a counselor who seized the flyers asked the girl if she was worried about AIDS, she said no, it didn’t matter. She’ll be dead before she’s twenty, anyway.
    Yet, this is also the kind of neighborhood where wealthy Angelenos regularly park their BMWs and Mercedeses, because the Thurgood Marshall Branch, one of ten juvenile courthouses spanning the huge bowl of the Los Angeles Basin, serves more than just its own troubled surroundings. Juvenile offenders from LA’s most upscale communities are hauled into the same courtrooms as well, from Beverly Hills to Hollywood to Malibu to Rancho Palos Verdes—the gangbangers’ parents sitting next to the bankers and moguls with their designer briefcases and tasseled loafers, all equally dazed by the odd mixture of chaos, informality, and impenetrable ritual so unique to Juvenile Court. Through a fluke of geography and bureaucracy, in one of the most racially and economically segregated regions of America, the three grimy courtrooms of Marshall Branch Juvenile Court have become the last great melting pot. Here, everyone finds a new common ground: fear. Fear of our own children.
    It is a fear seemingly grounded in fact, as juvenile crime, particularly violent crimes by kids, had ripped through the cities and suburbs of America like a new and deadly strain of virus for which no one possesses immunity. The figures were staggering: a 175 percent increase in juvenile murder rates since the 1970s, with similar boosts in juvenile crime of all kinds. Just in the last five years, violent offenses by