As state preps to ‘transform’ its youth prisons, can counties take up the slack?
LOS ANGELES — Eighty years after California created separate incarceration facilities to spare teenagers from being locked up alongside adults, the state has pledged to begin the shutdown of its long-troubled and frequently violent youth prisons.
The planned dismantling of the Division of Juvenile Justice, or DJJ, comes after years of scandal and mistreatment of young offenders, which spurred multiple reform efforts and more than a decade of state court oversight that ended in 2016. The shutdown mirrors changes across the country — embracing rehabilitation over punishment and confinement close to home, rather than in isolated state facilities.
Three remaining DJJ prisons will stop taking new prisoners in July, with rare exceptions. California plans to close the facilities — twin lockups in Stockton and another in Ventura — in July 2023, under a state law passed last year and a budget directive issued in January by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Longtime critics of the youth prisons called the pending closure “a transformational event,” coming just two decades after California voters passed Proposition 21, intended to get tough on young offenders by sending many to adult prisons.
As recently as 2019, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit group supportive of dismantling the state youth facilities, said in a scathing report that DJJ staff “abet violence, reinforce racial and ethnic conflicts, and legitimize institutional gangs.” The group hit DJJ again in December, for allegedly failing to rigorously prevent the spread of the coronavirus, which eventually infected about 13% of the department’s 1,400 staff members and 203 young prisoners.
But even reformers said the DJJ closure should not be viewed as a panacea for the ills of the juvenile justice system. Twin challenges lie ahead: assuring that the DJJ delivers something close to the “rehabilitative and restorative justice” it has long promised as it winds down over 29 months, and preparing counties to take on young people convicted of the most severe crimes, in a way that protects the community while also preparing the youths for life outside of prison.
“It has been a system designed to punish. And it’s a bad place for young people,” said Elizabeth Calvin, a senior advocate in the children’s rights division at Human Rights Watch. “It’s time to move on.”
Renee Menart, coauthor of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice report that enumerated DJJ’S failures, applauded the closure but added: “We need much more collaboration and planning now, to make sure we just don’t move the problems from the state to local level.”
The so-called “realignment” of juvenile justice from the state to local authorities arrives just as some counties, including
Los Angeles and San Francisco, have launched plans to lock up fewer young people convicted of crimes. Officials are trying to figure out what to do with teenagers convicted of murder and other serious felonies, as they simultaneously downsize juvenile halls and locked “camps.”
“This is particularly complicated given San Francisco’s current effort to close our existing juvenile hall,” reported probation officials in that county. Kings County protested that the shift to local responsibility made for “a vast undertaking with an incredibly short timeline and inadequate financial investment.”
In Los Angeles, District
Attorney George Gascón has promised to stop trying some juveniles as adults, adding to the urgency of finding a “secure alternative” for young people convicted of crimes. And state regulators recently banned counties from a former practice of sending some challenging youths to other states.
California has pledged more than $200 million a year to help local governments absorb the cost of housing and caring for the hundreds of young people who previously would have ended up in DJJ’S prisons. It also provides a stop-gap measure: Young people convicted of serious crimes can still be sent to DJJ as a last resort, to prevent them from being tried and sentenced as adults.
Incarceration reformers say the transition is well-timed, given the dramatic drop in crimes by young people over the last two decades. Police officers arrested one-fifth as many California juveniles in 2019 as they did in 2002, according to state Department of Justice statistics. As a result, nearly threequarters of California’s juvenilehall beds lie empty.
Emerging brain science has also changed the dynamics of the debate. The research has confirmed that adolescents have lower impulse control, greater mood swings and suffer longterm damage from the kind of prolonged isolation they endure in prison. In short: Punitive measures don’t work.
A group of young people previously held in DJJ facilities, including Kenzo Sohoue, told
Los Angeles County officials they need to focus their remade system on healing.
“The system has invested in the tools of punishment, like pepper spray, rubber bullets, guns, batons, Tasers, tear gas and other lethal weapons that have no place in a care-first model,” said
TSKHSohoue.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last week voted to continue planning to send youths once bound for state lockups into a “reimagined” local justice system. The language of the county’s plan emphasizes how much has changed in just two decades. In the the 1990s, nominally liberal Democrats called some young people convicted of crimes “superpredators.” And in 2000, more than 60% of Californians approved Proposition 21, a measure that made it easier to try kids as young as 14 as adults.
Under today’s proposed reforms in L.A. County (due to be phased in over five years or more), “system-involved” young people will be removed from oversight by the Probation Department and put under a new Department of Youth Development. Substantial new investment in education, counseling, recreation and other programs will attempt to divert teenagers away from the criminal justice system. Those arrested and convicted will be eligible to do their time in facilities called Safe and Secure Healing Centers, located close to their neighborhoods. Some of the small, home-like facilities will be locked; others will not.
Staff at the healing centers would preferably be trained not in law enforcement or corrections but in “social work, cultural healing and youth development practices.” The centers would be staffed in part by Credible Messengers, often men and women who have served jail or prison time and put their lives back together, according to the county’s plan.
The shift to local control, and the assumed failure of the old ways, does not enjoy universal support. Organizations representing counties and chief probation officers opposed SB
823, the legislation that directed closure of the DJJ prisons. The executive director of the Chief Probation Officers of California, Karen Pank, said the changes failed to acknowledge “the positive and trauma-informed work already being done at the local level for the vast majority of youth in the justice system.”
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