SAN JOSE -- After years of failed attempts to better serve juvenile offenders and the public's safety, California's once-sprawling youth corrections system may soon bow to a final, unprecedented strategy: shutting its locked gates for good.
Budget pressure in a system with annual costs of $200,000 per ward drove Gov. Jerry Brown this week to propose halting all new intakes at the Division of Juvenile Justice. If approved by state legislators, beginning next year the state's three remaining prisons would then shrink themselves to oblivion, as current inmates complete their terms. Under the plan, county probation departments would assume the custody and treatment of all juvenile offenders -- an expansion from current practice where only the most serious and violent are housed by the state.
But Brown's vision represents far more than just belt-tightening. Already, it's being described by youth crime experts across the country as a historic proposal given the state's size and the notorious history of its youth prisons. Mesh cages, 23-hour cell confinement and brutal staff beatings are all a well-documented part of that legacy.
"California is at the front end, cutting edge of what is going to be the huge trend going forward," said Bart Lubow, who directs national juvenile justice reforms for the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "And that is the policy embrace of the fundamental truth that kids do better when they are near their homes and in their communities."
Santa Cruz County is a relatively low user of the state's juvenile incarceration system, with just three county youths currently in the state system, said Scott MacDonald, chief of the county's Juvenile Hall and probation department.
That could be partially attributed to the county's higher-than-average rate of trying juvenile offenders as adults for serious crimes. A study released last year by the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that Santa Cruz County's rate of using the practice was 31.4 filed per 1,000 cases, compared to the state average of 25.4 per thousand.
Strong partnerships with local organizations have also helped keep a lot of the county's lower-level youth offenders out of the state system, MacDonald said.
Still, the change will come with fiscal implications, said MacDonald. The county's Juvenile Hall, which has 42 beds and currently houses about 20 youths, wasn't designed for keeping violent offenders or high-need offenders for long periods of time.
"Capacity isn't as much as an issue," he said. "We're not a facility geared toward accommodating that long-term custody for serious offenders."
The Casey Foundation's Lubow and other juvenile crime experts said they are unaware of any other state that has entirely eliminated its youth corrections system.
Corrections chief Matthew Cate described the Brown administration's plan to ultimately shutter the system -- save for a newly formed oversight board -- as a boon to public safety. "The biggest benefit is it keeps wards close to home," Cate said. "The evidence shows, especially with young people, that it eases the return to communities and reduces victimization."
California's state system has already reached milestones that youth advocates could only have dreamed of a decade ago. The in-custody population has plunged from more than 10,000 wards in 1996 to just 1,100 today. And for the first time in recent history, conditions inside the youth prisons have finally begun to improve, said the system's longtime chief rival, Donald Specter of the Marin-based Prison Law Office.
Specter and others who have spent decades attempting to overhaul the state's mammoth warehouses say they never imagined the reforms would ultimately become so costly, and the population so shrunken, that the institution would ultimately fold. But they share concerns about the county alternative: that absent a state option, more youth offenders will be sent into the adult prison, or housed in facilities even less equipped than those run by the state.
Unlike adults, juvenile offenders have a legal right to treatment, education and training, and the short-term model of a juvenile hall does not meet those needs. Likewise, county ranch programs are generally not secure enough to provide for maximum security.
Acknowledging accommodations will be needed, the Brown Administration has proposed giving counties one year and $10 million to prepare.
The change cannot come soon enough for Maria Sanchez, a typist from Santa Clarita whose 18-year-old son has spent the past year in the state's youth prison system after a robbery arrest. The teen began getting in trouble at age 13, attracted by gangs in his low-income neighborhood.
Sanchez said the state prison experience has battered her son. In visits, he has limped, sported a black eye and showed her bruises on his ribs, she said. And he has been spent 23 hours a day in his cell for as long as four months at a time, she added, emerging for a recreation hour shackled at the hands and feet.
Sanchez's observations are echoed in volumes of state-sanctioned reports prompted by a Prison Law Office lawsuit. Under a resulting 2004 settlement agreement, the state has labored to overhaul education, safety, treatment and mental health care programs. By all accounts, broader changes took years to even begin. That has led the state system's most dedicated reformers to now question whether counties will be able to create better alternatives for the high-end offenders in question, who typically suffer from severe mental illness and childhood trauma.
In Santa Clara County, Deputy Probation Chief Robert DeJesus said despite a highly-regarded ranch program and a juvenile hall with bed space, the county will struggle without the state option. Currently there are 14 county juvenile offenders in state custody, including three admitted last year.
"With only one year, that's going to be extremely difficult for Santa Clara County to respond," DeJesus said.
The changes won't impact some counties, such as Santa Cruz County, as much as others, but that doesn't mean the transition will be just smooth sailing.
Jessica M. Pasko of The Santa Cruz Sentinel contributed to this report.
Source: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_19694374?source=rss_emailed
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