CALIFORNIA JUVENILE SYSTEM VIOLATES OWN POLICIES
By Trey Bundy on June 6, 2011 - 3:50 p.m. PDT
Courtesy photo The state completed the planned closing of the Preston Youth Correctional Facility near Stockton last week. Only four state juvenile detention centers remain.
Inmates in California’s youth prison system were subjected to nearly round-the-clock confinement on hundreds of occasions and had to attend school in closets, showers and storerooms because of staff shortages and rampant violence among prisoners, according to a recent state audit.
While Division of Juvenile Justice guidelines state that young prisoners can be confined to their rooms no more than 21 hours a day, the audit found 249 instances between January and April this year in which DJJ had violated its own policy.
At the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility — one of four state-run institutions, which house a total of roughly 1,200 offenders — youth on restricted programs averaged only 40 minutes out of their rooms each day, according to the audit. One of the inmates told an auditor that he had been in his room for more than 24 hours prior to his interview with her; a logbook from the facility confirmed his account.
The audit, conducted by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, surfaced as part of a motion that the Prison Law Office, a Bay Area nonprofit, filed late last month in Alameda County Superior Court with the goal of expediting DJJ’s compliance with court-ordered reforms.
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Amid recent debate over whether to shutter the long-troubled state detention centers, the new findings suggest a system struggling with inadequate staffing, outdated facilities and frequent violence.
“Those findings are consistent with what experts have been saying month after month, year after year, and the problem has not been solved,” said Sara Norman, an attorney at the Prison Law Office who filed the motion. “These are the problems that are hurting the youth the most, and we are out of patience.”
DJJ has been operating under a court order to implement sweeping reforms since 2004, when an Alameda County lawsuit, Farrell v. Cate, brought to light poor living conditions and blatant abuses of young people inside state-run facilities.
A decade-long push to close DJJ and treat young offenders at the county level — waged largely by experts and advocates in the Bay Area — seemed to be gaining traction earlier this year when Gov. Jerry Brown submitted a budget proposal calling for the system’s closure.
Brown backed off of his plan at the end of February in the face of intense lobbying by interest groups — including the Chief Probation Officers of California, an association of county probation officials — who were concerned that counties were unprepared to handle the serious offenders currently held at DJJ.
Some advocates, however, offer the new audit’s findings as evidence that the state cannot handle the challenging population either, and that not much has changed since the Farrell decision.
“Our young people can’t afford one more day in these abusive conditions,” said Sumayyah Waheed of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland nonprofit that has argued for the closure of DJJ for several years. “This is just further proof that the California youth prison system is broken and can’t be fixed.”