Plan to close juvenile hall extended
“Originally, we thought we could just find a big house and fix it up. But that was wishful thinking. There is not an existing building that meets the state regulations for a secure building.” S.F. Supervisor Hillary Ronen
ing a secure site for youth who pose a public safety risk.
While no clear timeline or new deadline has been set, officials acknowledged this week that juvenile hall may remain open for many more years, highlighting how difficult criminal justice reform can be even amid strong political support. The city is struggling to find an acceptable site for a smaller “non-institutional” building that would be secure enough to meet state regulations for youth deemed dangerous.
“If I had to give a realistic estimate (for closure), it would be three years,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, co-sponsor of the legislation to shutter juvenile hall.
Ronen acknowledged that the original goal was overly ambitious.
“Originally, we thought we could just find a big house and fix it up,” she said. “But that was wishful thinking. There is not an existing building that meets the state regulations for a secure building.”
Ronen said the realistic conclusion is that a new building will need to be constructed to meet state regulations. Those rules include a requirement that the building have hallways that are at least 8 feet wide, which is exceedingly rare.
San Francisco’s juvenile hall had just 11 occupants on Thursday. An average of 14 juveniles per day were kept in custody in San Francisco in 2021 — at an annual cost of about $1.1 million each— inside a facility built to hold as many as 150 people.
Juvenile Probation Chief Katy Weinstein Miller said at a special meeting of the supervisors’ Youth, Young Adults and Families Committee on Thursday that her department is seeking $500,000 in the next city budget for an architect or designer to work with the community on a vision for a new building. No new site has yet been identified.
According to a report from the juvenile hall closure task force last year, possible sites included cottages on the Edgewood Center for Children and Families campus in the Sunset District, where other spaces are used for mental health crisis care and other treatment. Other options include a former Academy of Arts residential building or the purchase of an industrial warehouse converted into a therapeutic setting. Miller said she also believes the current juvenile hall site should be considered, though she acknowledged that site would be controversial.
Ronen insisted that supervisors remain committed to closing juvenile hall.
“Our urgency and our goal have not changed,” she said Friday. “What’s changed is how we practically see ourselves getting to that goal.”
Speakers from a collection of city departments — including the police, district attorney, public defender, juvenile probation and public health — spoke at Thursday’s hearing and agreed that the city should continue to expand on its current strategy of steering juvenile offenders away from prison-like settings and toward supportive programs.
Already, youth who are arrested are typically diverted from juvenile hall and into programs they attend while living at home or in a group home.
Ronen and Supervisor Shamann Walton voted Thursday to continue the discussion. Supervisors Myrna Melgar and Ahsha Safaí were absent.
Advocates of the juvenile hall shutdown, including a group of youth activists, said the city needs to move more quickly, and shouldn’t focus so much energy on a new building — which they labeled “just a jail by another name.” Instead, they said, the city should aim to end incarceration by providing sufficient services to keep youth from needing to be held in a secure facility.
The hearing, and the renewed attention on closing juvenile hall, comes as concern about crime in San Francisco runs high, even as data shows a complex picture, and a variety of polls show that most San Franciscans support the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who they believe has been too lenient.
Supporters of the 2019 decision to close juvenile hall cited the trauma inflicted on young offenders in a setting where they sleep in locked cells on thin upholstered mats set atop concrete platforms. City officials deemed the detention morally unacceptable and ineffective at rehabilitating young people. They also decried the exorbitant cost.
Walton said it was important to acknowledge the progress the city has made in reforming juvenile justice.
“We are in a much better space now than we were then,” he said.
Plans to shutter juvenile hall have also been slowed by COVID as well as the state’s decision to close California youth prisons, which leaves nowhere to send youth offenders convicted of serious crimes.
In the next year, Ronen said, she envisions having a design informed by community feedback as well as a site selected. She also hopes the city will have figured out how to pay for construction.
Walton said the next steps also include directing the creation of support programs for children and families identified in the task force report.
That would include the creation of one or more wellness advocate positions to help youth and families ensure they’re getting the services they need and a commitment by all city agencies that work with troubled youth to collaborate with the Juvenile Probation Department, and with youth advocates, to change the way juvenile hall is operated.
“At the end of the day, there are some issues we are not fully in control of,” Walton told The Chronicle, citing the need for court approval. “But we are not backsliding.”