More than fourteen thousand people are warehoused in its stone cells, and it became a second home to Chino and his crew, as it has to generations of teenagers from his neighborhood. But something strange was happening—his drug charges kept disappearing. He was arrested and charged, but the paperwork seemed to vanish. “If you look at my criminal record on its face,” Chino says, “I got let out of the back door of the courthouse a lot, without even seeing a judge. I got let go from the precinct. I had charges that you cannot believe they still let me go.”
