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CENTER ON JUVENILE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE PRESS ROOM |
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| www.cjcj.org |
| Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 1622 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 | Tel: (415) 621-5661 | Fax: (415) 621-5466 |
Ventura County's new $65 million juvenile hall will stand half-empty for years if the youth crime rate keeps dropping as it has since 1996 and probation officials continue reforms aimed at locking up fewer minors.
While the county must open the complex in El Rio with enough staff to handle at least 310 juveniles, that figure is well above the 200 youths now confined in juvenile hall, boot camp and rehabilitation programs. State funding rules require the county to set aside $4 million a year to fully staff the facility no matter how few kids are in it.
All that adds up to a growing pressure to fill the new facility once it opens in June 2003 at a time when the county is strapped for cash and probation officials are trying to lower the number of kids behind bars. "I'm afraid there will be this syndrome of 'if you build it, they will come,' " said David Steinhart, a consultant for the Anne E. Casey Foundation, which is funding a new detention reform initiative in Ventura County.
"All that space, all that money spent -- the pressure will be on the county to justify why they asked for that many beds in the first place. These awards could only be given to counties that promised to detain more kids. I'm concerned the result will be counties locking up more kids than ever at more cost and less effect."
County supervisors say they do not want to see a rush to fill the new complex, and if they have to go back to the state and ask for a reprieve from the staffing requirement they will. Supervisors Kathy Long and Judy Mikels sat on a county steering committee in 1998 that directed the Probation Agency to seek the $40.5 million state and federal grant -- the second largest in the state.
"If we have to go to the state and beg forgiveness for not meeting our projections, we'll do that," Long said. "Having to pay all that money to (over-staff) the facility puts a tremendous pressure on the Board of Supervisors. But we need to be sure that's the case, that these detention and arrest rates are for real and will last, before we go back to the state."
Mikels did not return repeated phone calls.
State officials say the county pushed hard for the multimillion dollar grant and that the award was based on the Probation Agency's own analysis that concluded 310 juveniles would be detained on opening day and 420 by 2009.
"If things change, the county will have to notify us, and we'll have to evaluate the grant," said Doug Holien, the county contact on the project for the Board of Corrections.
Holien would not say whether the county would have to give part of the grant back if the numbers change. State legislation regarding the construction grants requires that the beds be used only for detention. That means the county can't use the extra empty space for other needs, such as group home beds. About one of every eight juveniles detained in the hall currently is being held there until a spot opens up in a group home.
State building boom
The pressure to detain more kids is simmering in counties statewide as new juvenile facilities are being built at a record pace in California.
Since 1997, California has earmarked $452 million to build and overhaul county juvenile justice facilities in 40 counties. Most of the money -- $280 million -- comes from federal government grants aimed at locking up more violent juvenile offenders. The remaining $172 million is state money.
Statewide, 3,375 new beds are being added to the 6,000 existing juvenile hall beds -- a50 percent increase. Nearly 2,000 beds are being built to replace those in run-down, antiquated juvenile halls.
Ventura County's new 420-bed facility will replace the current 84-bed juvenile hall, a work rehabilitation camp in Camarillo and a boot camp in San Luis Obispo County for a net gain of 272 new beds.
The building boom is long overdue, correctional officials say. County juvenile halls are old, crowded, and, in many cases, unsafe by building code standards. Under those conditions, kids are not getting the programming, counseling or education they need as required by law, County Probation Officer Cal Remington said.
"We can't have adequate anything at that current hall," which was built 60 years ago, Remington said. "We don't want to lock up kids that shouldn't be locked up, but when we do we need to do a much better job of working with them. The new complex will give us the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to detention."
Remington said a population boom is also expected in coming years, bringing the added risk of more crime-prone juveniles. In the next decade, California's youth population ages 12 to 17 is projected to grow by nearly one-third.
Prevention is working
Critics of the size of the building boom -- including Ventura County's -- fear the pressure to fill the new halls will trump prevention efforts like after-school and neighborhood programs that are keeping kids out of trouble.
Since 1996, California has poured $1.3 billion into prevention efforts -- Ventura County's share to date is $18.3 million -- that appear to be working. The money put probation officers at schools, created centers where troubled youths could go for afternoon basketball games and study halls, and hooked up social workers and mental health counselors with families to address the big picture, not just a teen-ager's delinquent behavior.
From 1996 to 2000, juvenile arrest rates for violent crimes plunged 31 percent statewide. In Ventura County, the rate dropped by the same percentage, while even gang-plagued Los Angeles County saw its rate of arrest for violent crimes among teen-agers drop 41 percent.
Advocates like attorney Deborah Vargas with the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice worry that the millions it will cost to operate the new complexes will siphon away prevention dollars, leading to a sort of self-fulfilling "lock-em-up" prophecy.
"The felony and misdemeanor arrest rates are dropping, but detention beds are rising," Vargas said. "The ones increasingly being locked up are low-level offenders in California. That's expensive -- $156 to
The existing Ventura County juvenile hall is overcrowded --as thispicture shows, cots sometimes have to be placedin cells -- but some criticssay the new one being built in El Rio won't be full for years but must bestaffed as though it is.
After school, juvenile hall wards return to their cell blocks with theirhands behind their backs as a security measure. Grants for the new juvenilehall were based on the county's estimates of future space needs, butquestions are being raised now that the population might be much lower thanexpected.
The county's juvenile hall, the Clifton Tatum Center, above, is onHillmont Avenue in Ventura. Below, razor wire surrounds the recreationyard, where wards play basketball. The new420-bed facility will replacethe current 84-bed juvenile hall, a work rehabilitation campin Camarilloand a boot camp in San Luis Obispo County for a net gain of 272 new beds.
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