New correctional program designed to make CYA more effective

Juvenile delinquents who are sent to the California Youth Authority in the coming years will be exposed to a new correctional program that includes living in smaller groups with more staff, and receiving better education and counseling services.

The CYA has outlined in court documents its plan to replace the existing prison culture, in which inmates are sometimes locked in cages or subdued with pepper spray, with a program aimed at rehabilitation to help promote responsibility and turn around youthful offenders in the nation’s most populous state.
The plan will not affect the William F. James Boys Ranch in Morgan Hill because offenders at the ranch are mostly convicted of lesser offenses, such as property crimes, including theft, or drug crimes. Santa Clara County Chief Probation Officer Sheila Mitchell said she knows little of the CYA’s plans at this point, but pointed out that local juvenile delinquents would benefit from a system focused on rehabilitation.
“If they’re able to do that, then that will be really good for the young people that they will serve,” Mitchell said. “The main thing for us is that any of the boys that are committed out of Santa Clara County to the Youth Authority, we want to make sure that the environment that they go to is the best available, so as much as the Youth Authority improves their program and their processes, then it’s going to benefit (the juveniles).”

More than 70 percent of juvenile offenders who are released from the California Youth Authority are re-arrested within three years, which Youth and Adult Correctional Agency Secretary Roderick Q. Hickman says points to the state’s need to dramatically improve how it deals with the 3,288 offenders in its facilities.
Roger Cornia, school safety officer for Gilroy Unified School District, said more rehabilitative services are needed for juvenile offenders, but that those services should be available even before a youth is sent to a CYA facility.
As both a school district employee and former juvenile probation officer, Cornia said he sees judges wait too long to provide mandatory counseling or other family services.
“By the time it gets there, it’s too late — the kid is 15 or 16 and really immersed in a lifestyle. It’s really hard to turn around a kid that age,” Cornia said. “You almost have to make a decision on which ones are savable, and which ones are so immersed in the lifestyle, and sometimes it’s a whole family structure and a whole neighborhood structure that they’re coming from, and it can be difficult to turn them around.”
Cornia said some of the juveniles convicted of capital offenses may be rehabilitated if the CYA does not allow them to become indoctrinated in prison life.

More details of the CYA plan will be revealed in November, although CYA officials say they will emphasize teaching juveniles respect and to take responsibility for their actions.
“If they deal with the drug issues that the majority of these kids will have, then we do have a shot, but that’s going to take a lot of time and money, and boy, the resources are so thin on our society already,” Cornia said.
In Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s May revision of the 2005-06 budget, he earmarked $3.1 million on plans to replace the large, sometimes old, prison-like youth facilities as part of his effort to reinvent the “broken juvenile corrections system.”
But the earliest any new facilities would open is late 2008, and some current facilities would remain open years longer.

As the population of youthful offenders, now about 3,300, continues to drop, the administration agreed not to cut the number of employees or close any of its eight facilities.
Over two years, that will trim the number of youths in each living unit from as many as 70 to no more than 40, and raise the ratio of employees to youths, the administration projected.
One expert who says she’s watched the demise of the CYA during the past decade will be waiting for more detailed plans from the state with interest.
“I want to see them fulfill what the statutory obligation is to youths in their care, which they admittedly haven’t been doing,” said Sue Burrell, a staff attorney with the Youth Law Center. “I will be very anxious to see the details of it, because what was filed with the court didn’t commit them to much.”
Burrell said it makes good sense that the CYA will draw on successful programs in other states, including Colorado, Washington and Missouri, but she “wanted it to happen yesterday.”

“From the inspector general’s report that came out just a couple weeks ago, conditions are just as bad and in some cases worse than ever for the young people who are in a Youth Authority right now, so how many of those kids are going to sacrificed while the state figures out what to do and gets something better in place,” she said.

Lori Stuenkel
5 July 2005

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