JUVENILE JUSTICE
California trying to reform juvenile
system
When Will Roy entered a state juvenile facility for
robbery as a 16-year-old, he said officials encouraged him to join a
prison gang because being unaffiliated was too dangerous. Once he did,
the gang's name was tacked over his cell door. Roy drew an extra year
for fighting, another year for smoking smuggled marijuana, and after
serving six years, said he can no longer show emotion for fear it will
be perceived as weakness. “You have to constantly be on your toes,” Roy
said during a recent rally at the state Capitol. “In an institutional
setting, that would show vulnerability.”
The problems within the California Youth Authority
have reformers proposing everything from giving counties responsibility
for many of the most violent youths to dismantling the state system
altogether.
State Sen. Gloria Romero has called the state's
juvenile facilities “a gladiator school to hone one's skills in
brutality and criminality.”
Recent reports by national experts said authorities at
one youth facility used chemical Mace on 270 offenders in one month last
year. Experts say offenders are routinely locked in small wire mesh
cages or in their cells for 23 hours a day. And even with California's
population of wards in decline, things have gotten so bad that some
local officials do everything they can to avoid sending offenders into
the system.
“We've had a long-standing policy not to send youth to
the California Youth Authority precisely because we would hear these
stories,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.
Authorities generally exhaust every other alternative
before sending juveniles into the system, saving it for the most violent
youths. It often is a last chance before juveniles are prosecuted as
adults, said Kurt Kumli, a longtime critic who heads the Santa Clara
County district attorney's juvenile division. “It really is the last
place in the juvenile justice system that you want to place kids,” Kumli
said.
Five counties, most in the San Francisco Bay area,
have decided or are considering whether to stop sending juveniles to
state facilities. Eleven counties in that area also considered creating
their own regional youth facility, but decided to give new leadership at
the California Youth Authority a chance, said Loren Buddress, chairman
and San Mateo County chief probation officer. They formed a committee to
visit selected youth facilities over the next year to gauge whether the
reform promises were being met.
Experts say the move away from state facilities may be
the best way to reform the system. About 40 percent of state wards are
nonviolent and could safely be moved to county-run programs, said David
Steinhart, who directs the juvenile justice program at Commonweal, a
Bay-area reform and advocacy group.
San Francisco once sent more than 100 youths each year
to state facilities, among the most in the state, said Dan Macallair,
director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. But starting in
1978, the county began creating its own juvenile camps and centers,
coupled with intensive screening, intervention and probation programs
designed to keep troubled youths out of any facilities where possible.
San Francisco has just three wards in state custody now.
“You can take that model and apply it in other
counties,” Macallair said. “It's time we moved away from the old 19th
Century training school design.”
Overall, the system's population has plummeted since
10,500 youths were being triple-bunked in warehouse-style wards in 1995.
A system that held 7,890 youths in June 2000 was down to 4,351 by last
month, a decline of 300 just since November. It's partly because of an
aging population and a drop in juvenile crime, and partly by design. To
reduce crowding, a 1997 state law charged counties more to send less
serious offenders.
Counties still only pay about 75 percent of the cost
of sending their worst youths to state facilities, said Gregory
Jolivette, director of the Legislative Analyst's criminal justice
section. They should be charged 100 percent, he said, a further
incentive to build their own rehabilitation centers or find
alternatives.
Romero, the state senator, said it might be better to
eliminate the youth authority and spend its $450 million budget on
county rehabilitation programs and facilities. And the state's
nonpartisan Legislative Analyst recommended a severe downsizing that
would put most responsibility for young criminals' rehabilitation on
counties.
Yet Steinhart, Macallair and other reformers are
concerned that budget-strapped counties are in no better position than
the state to expand youth programs and parole oversight. And while
rehabilitation is one goal, protecting the community from violent
predators is another, said prosecutor Kumli. There may always be a need
for some state facility to lock them away. “The youth authority exists
for a reason,” he said. “These are kids who committed rapes, who
committed armed robberies, who committed murder.”
By Don Thompson
12 March 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Calif%20Youth%20Inmates
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