Behind juvenile system’s failures
A third of county’s probationers are rearrested within a year, study reveals.
It took $400,000 and nearly four years of work to uncover, but experts now know a basic fact about Los Angeles County’s juvenile delinquency system: Onethird of probationers are rearrested within a year of their release.
“The county has the biggest child prisons in the country, and they couldn’t tell you if the kids got fixed,” said civil rights attorney Connie Rice, co-founder of the Advancement Project, the nonprofit that funded the study.
The study, led by researcher Denise C. Herz at Cal State L.A., also sought to document the chaotic home lives of the children who end up in the county’s detention camps, group homes, psychiatric hospitals and community-based placements.
Half of the children come from families who survive on public assistance. A third come from families with substance abuse. Twothirds have parents or siblings who have been arrested or incarcerated. And 1 in 5 comes from gang involved families.
“We are doing a better job keeping these kids in the community, but if we are not addressing some of those chaotic factors that make their lives unstable, they are more likely to come back to camps or suitable placement,” Herz said.
The youths themselves suffered from mental illness at an alarming rate, with 92% receiving some kind of diagnosis. Half also had problems with substance abuse, especially alcohol and marijuana.
“You can see the problems and their home situations and all the things that have doomed these kids. You can’t put that all on probation,” Rice said, adding that the county needs to do a better job partnering with other county departments and community groups to coordinate care for the children.
Experts said they were somewhat encouraged, however, that even more children are not rearrested, given the reality that the youths come from such troubled backgrounds and that many have been previously arrested numerous times before coming into custody.
“I honestly thought the rate was going to be higher,” Rice said.
But researchers lamented that the Probation Department’s data collection system was often unsophisticated and unable to yield basic information needed to ensure that services for the children are properly organized. Data on the length and effectiveness of treatment programs, for instance, remain a mystery.
The information in the report was time-consuming to compile, they said, because they had to read narrative-style notations in 100 case files for children under county supervision in 2011.
Probation chief Jerry Powers acknowledged that no current proposals exist to significantly improve data monitoring. “I couldn’t even begin to guess how much it would cost,” he said.
But researchers said it wasn’t just logistical obstacles that stood in their way; they said they also confronted a culture in the county that was reluctant to compile and analyze data.
The study, Rice said, “was frightening to people. But since it was our money, they couldn’t shut it down, even though they tried.”
Powers acknowledged that “there was more than one person who said, ‘They are just going to beat you over the shoulder with this information.’ ”
But once the data was clear, he said, he was encouraged with his department’s results because the youths in the study had experienced so much trauma and so many previous arrests before arriving in probation’s care.
“This is really the first group of kids coming out of the reformed camp system after the Department of Justice came in to monitor,” he said. “If this recidivism number holds, that’s pretty remarkable.”
In 2008, the county agreed to be intensively monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice after it cited the county’s camps for misuse of force against many of the youths, but Powers said the county is now in compliance with the federal government’s mandated reforms.
Simultaneous to the reforms, the county has greatly reduced the number of youths incarcerated in the camps under the belief that most children receive more effective interventions in their own homes.
About 580 youths stay inside 14 camps and one residential drug treatment facility on any given night. In 2008, three times that many were locked there.
Nationally, juvenile crime, including violent crime, fell by half from 1997 to 2011, to its lowest level in more than 30 years.
At the same time, youth confinement rates also declined by almost half.