Punishment enough?

In the early morning hours of Jan. 8, 2017, Eduardo Hurtado and a friend drove through Chapmantown looking for a young man they believed to be responsible for shooting Hurtado’s cousin days earlier. They’d arranged to meet him, a “southerner,” to buy some drugs and, upon locating his vehicle, they opened fire. In all, 14 shell casings were found at the scene and three victims were taken to Enloe with gunshot wounds, none of them life-threatening.

Hurtado was later arrested and confessed to the crime, saying it had been ordered by more senior members of the Norteño gang, of which he was a member. It was the first time he’d ever shot a gun, he said. And while killing the man responsible for his cousin’s shooting had certainly been discussed, Hurtado says he had no intention of hurting anyone—he wasn’t even looking at where he aimed the gun.

But Hurtado’s intentions weren’t the sole reason Butte County Superior Court Judge Robert Glusman sentenced him to probation—versus prison time—for shooting at a car full of people. No, that was due to the fact that he’d decided to denounce the gang, and the probability of being targeted and even killed in prison because of it, according to District Attorney Mike Ramsey, who added that he did not agree that Hurtado faced any danger in prison.

“I accept full responsibility for my case,” Hurtado told detectives, according to his probation report. “I wish I never had done it. I wish I had the balls to say no, but the position I was in, I didn’t want anything to come back on me. I tried to go through with the plan without hurting anybody and just get it done without anyone hurting my family. That’s why I wanted to get out of the gang. … I don’t want my little brother getting involved with gangs. That’s why I feel bad. I couldn’t kill someone’s kid, and have their parents live with that. That’s not me.”

Leaving a gang is not done easily and not taken lightly by other members. The Norteño motto, in fact, reads: “If I lead, follow me. If I hesitate, push me. If they kill me, avenge me. If I’m a traitor, kill me.”

“If he hadn’t denounced the gang, he probably would have gotten straight prison—nine years, and he’d probably serve seven,” said Ron Reed, a local public defender who works regularly with young people but did not represent Hurtado, 19. “If he drops out and goes to prison, he most likely will be killed—maybe just stabbed.

“I think Judge Glusman showed a lot of courage in granting him probation,” he continued. “There are two ways to protect ourselves from dangerous people: one is to lock them up; two is to change them. Locking them up is the easy way—but you can’t lock ’em up forever.”

The Norteños are Chico’s most prominent gang, says Chico Police Det. Sgt. Brian Miller, who works in the department’s gang unit. While they don’t keep a list of members, he estimated there to be hundreds of them in the community.

“They’re in our schools, they’re connected with our prisons,” he said. “Some of these kids are born into it. We have families that are known Norteño families—so, they’re immediately indoctrinated. In the past, one of the best ways to change that was through school resource officers.”

While school resource officers were eliminated during layoffs following the Great Recession, Miller said they were a huge asset to the police when it came to making early interventions with troubled kids.

“When we had detectives in the schools, they got to know these kids on a personal basis,” he said. “Then when patrol officers or detectives start hearing about crimes, they can go to the school resource officer and handle it at the juvenile level before it becomes a bigger problem. It’s a lot harder to change them as adults.”

The gang life is an attractive one, Miller said, because it often brings money and partying, as well as a safety net, an extended family.

“You do see kids choose not to go down that road,” Miller said. “For some kids it’s hard. If your only family or source of validation are gang members, that’s asking a lot for a kid to resist that. We’re all products of what we were taught and who loves us, and there are kids out there who the only people who loved them were gang members.”

Reed, who works regularly with defendants in juvenile hall, agrees.

“I’m deeply concerned about the kids that get involved in gangs,” he said. “I find them when they’re 14, 15 years old and they tell me, ‘Hey, I will be a gangbanger until I die.’ There is an attraction there.”

For Reed in particular, Hurtado’s case offers a chance to look at the system of punishing people who commit crimes. For some, jail or prison is needed. For others, it may not be the best answer. He pointed to the fact that the average age of people who commit crimes today is 34. Twenty years ago, however, that number was closer to 21.

“I call them the scarred misfits,” Reed said of the older criminals. “They’re people who mostly have gone to prison—just what the people want to do to Eduardo. If he serves seven years, he comes out a scarred misfit who’s lost his roots in society. He’s feeling that he is a misfit, a scarred misfit. Prison didn’t teach him anything other than how to be angry and he’s a misfit because people really don’t want him around. He’s not a good candidate for a job, and committing crimes is not something that he feels is morally repugnant. Society hasn’t done anything for him.”

While the prosecutor and court-appointed counselor recommended prison for Hurtado, Reed said Glusman did the right thing in giving him the lesser sentence of probation, which came with the requirement that he check into a rehabilitation facility to address his alcohol, cocaine and marijuana use.

“The whole idea of how we punish people is pretty important,” he said. “We must change.”