"No Matter How Loud I Shout," a report on Los Angeles' juvenile courts by the Pulitzer-winning journalist Edward Humes, takes its title from a poem by one of the student-inmates Humes taught in his Juvenile Hall writing class: "Take a trip in my mind see all that I've seen, and you'd be called a beast, not a human being. Fuck it, 'cause there's not much I can do, there's no way out, my screams have no voice no matter how loud I shout." When Humes lets these kids speak -- as he often does in this book -- the story of the very young committing very serious crimes explains itself. Their words bring depth and sincerity to Humes' account, which is based on his year both in the courts and Juvenile Hall, and employs his remarkable access to judges, prosecutors and unpublished reports on juvenile crime in L.A.

Yet troubling aspects begin to creep in early. First, Humes makes it nearly three-quarters of the way through his account without saying anything decent about a public defender. Second, his language often has a brittle, cliched quality (he favors the term "gangbangers" and the adjective "hardened"). Hume's facts often seem dubiously overfamiliar as well. He writes that we are in "an age of unprecedented violent crime," and that the young are the core of the problem. Yet the murder rate has remained stable for the past 50 years, and only one-half of one percent of all juvenile arrests in 1994 were for violent crimes.

The main point Humes misses throughout this narrative -- he tells the story of seven young offenders' lives -- is the role of racial bias in the courts. Sure, we're offered a throw-away line from a public defender about the hopelessness, in this country, of being young, black and charged with murder. Yet Humes' essential take is that chaos and randomness reign. Chaos? Definitely. Randomness? In the land of Rodney King and O.J. Simpson, not very likely.

-- Brenda Coughlin