Closing Down the CYA For Good
Brown calls for elimination of youth prison system and shifting of state prisoners to county jails
By Karen de Sá
San Jose Mercury News
01/14/2011
http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county/ci_17091138?nclick_check=1
The budget Gov. Jerry Brown presented this week calls for the most sweeping criminal justice overhaul in state history -- the elimination of the youth prison system and an end to prison terms for thousands of low-risk adult convicts who, going forward, would be housed in county-run jails instead of the state's teeming lockups.
Brown says the changes, if enacted by the Legislature in March, would save the embattled state almost half a billion dollars next fiscal year -- and $1.4 billion annually in the long haul -- while relieving prison overcrowding that has sparked federal lawsuits.
The plan responds to years of advice from criminologists, finance experts and justice advocates who say reducing the prison population could also enhance public safety by placing low-level offenders closer to their families and community-based treatment programs. In his budget message, Brown argues that local governments are better positioned to end "the revolving door of the corrections systems."
Many criminal justice experts agree. "This is just an incredibly massive shift for a state system that was sending everybody and their brother to prison," said Joan Petersilia, a Stanford University criminologist. Petersilia, who has worked with two successive gubernatorial administrations on the change, described it as "the most significant in California history."
But she offered widely echoed caution: "We shouldn't be naive and think we can do this on the cheap -- these offenders have serious needs."
California is already facing a federal court order to reduce its adult inmate population by nearly one-quarter; an appeal is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
If legislators agree with Brown's plan, the state would stop housing 37,000 adult convicts each year who are short-timers, low-level offenders and parole violators. Those groups instead would be held in county jails at a cost some experts say could be half the current burden.
Costs for housing juvenile offenders would plunge as well; the state has paid as much as a quarter-million dollars annually for each young inmate. Eliminating the entire Division of Juvenile Justice would save the state $250 million a year, Brown says.
While California's adult prison population has burgeoned, thanks in part to tough sentencing laws enacted in recent decades, the number of juvenile offenders in state custody has plunged, due to record-low youth crime rates and a 2007 law that shifted all but the most serious and violent offenders to counties.
Dan Macallair, director of the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, says that has left few justifications for the high cost of revamping the aging youth prisons, as a state court has ordered.
"We've spent too much time, energy and resources on something we could not fix," Macallair said. "There's no justification for this -- it's the definition of insanity."
Yet while Macallair represents one faction among youth advocates, even some of the most ardent critics of the youth prison system -- including attorneys behind the lawsuit charging inhumane conditions -- say the governor is going too far. They maintain that some state institution, however scaled-back, must be available for high-end juvenile offenders whose counties lack the appropriate treatment programs.
Similar concerns -- along with the entrenched power of California's prison guards union -- helped scuttle Republican former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's efforts to implement changes similar to parts of Brown's plan.
But the current economic crisis is kicking the push for an overhaul into gear and winning the support of earlier opponents such as local sheriffs.
County officials beaten down by budget cuts are cautiously embracing the change -- if they're given the resources to house more offenders in their empty jails and juvenile halls and provide addiction and mental health treatment and job training. Many counties have empty beds in their jails and juvenile halls.
But not San Mateo County, where the jail is currently 130 percent to 140 percent over capacity, said Sheriff Greg Munks. "If they ship people back in the near term we'll be in big trouble," he added.
However, San Mateo County plans to have a new $140 million jail open by the end of 2013. Construction has not started, but the county recently bought the land for it.
Munks said he and other officials around the state have been expecting some kind of prisoner transfer from the state.
According to statistics compiled by criminologist James Austin -- an expert in the federal court proceedings that found the state's overcrowded prisons violate the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment -- there are now about 12,500 jail beds available in California's 10 largest counties. Given a staggered release of inmates, those beds could accommodate the majority of those who would be moved under Brown's plan, Austin says.
Local facilities that could house the state's youth offenders also have capacity, according to Macallair's justice center. Thanks to a spate of juvenile hall construction in the late 1990s, Macallair's group reported that there are enough beds in county institutions to house the entire state juvenile justice population "and still have 200 to 1,000 empty beds remaining."
Nick Warner, legislative director for the California State Sheriffs' Association, said 34 counties are at capacity -- and if beds are not added in those jails, some inmates would have to be released early to make room. "If the money were there, we think there's a workable solution," Warner said. "But without the money, this is the worst public safety proposal the state of California has ever seen."
Indeed, funding could be key to the plan's long-term success. Brown is hoping voters will extend three statewide taxes in a June special election. If they don't, the administration says it can still pay for local jails to house state inmates, but there will likely not be enough for training and treatment programs to keep them from reoffending.
Despite that risk, Brown and experts say they can't defend the current high cost of housing so many state prisoners.
According to state reports, 11,000 prisoners served less than 30 days in 2009, and 47,000 served three months or less. These inmates spent most of their time in county jails before being shipped off to the state.
"The cost of sending people to state prison for a week or a month is huge," said Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin State Prison and now a senior fellow at UC Berkeley. At state reception centers, she noted, many of the same medical tests, psychological screening and caseworker reports done in the county jails are repeated.
The families of many juvenile offenders say the prospect of locally based programs is a blessing. Lourdes Duarte-Bailey, whose son spent five years in the state's youth prisons beginning at age 16 on drug and theft charges, said she is "rejoicing" over Brown's announcement.
Bailey says her son returned from the violent youth prisons hardened and ill-equipped to manage life on the outside.
"We've been paying $240,00 a year for one child," Duarte said. "So where was all that money going? I'm hoping counties will do better."
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Gov. Brown has proposed scrapping the state's criticized juvenile justice agency
and shifting responsibility to the local level
Trey Bundy
Saturday, January 22, 2011
http://www.baycitizen.org/crime/story/can-counties-handle-young-offenders-own/
Joaquin E. DiazDeLeon, a former Fresno gang member, spent two years inside California’s juvenile prison system. What he found there, he said, was no better than the streets he came from.
Instead of rehabilitating young offenders, he said, correctional officers spent most of their time separating rival gangs. Violence was so pervasive, he said, that he kept his gang affiliation just to protect himself.
“Basically you’re being thrown in a box and expected to change,” said DiazDeLeon, 21, now a student at City College of San Francisco.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent proposal to eliminate California’s Division of Juvenile Justice was billed as a way to cut $242 million from the state budget. It was also the culmination of a decade-long effort to shut the state’s troubled youth prison system, which for years has been plagued by violence, abuse and decaying facilities.
Much of that effort has been centered in the Bay Area after accusations of abuse and neglect at the institutions surfaced in a 2003 Alameda County lawsuit. In recent years, some local judges often refused to send young offenders to state institutions, preferring to confine them in county facilities regarded as safer and more effective.
Brown’s initiative would take that unofficial policy further. It would scrap the state juvenile justice system and shift responsibility for confining the most violent young offenders to the local level, where they are nearer to family and have more community treatment options. The move would affect the 1,300 youths in state care, down from 10,000 in 1996.
Even among critics of the Division of Juvenile Justice, the proposed shift has set off a new debate over whether counties are equipped to handle an influx of severely troubled young people.
“I’m disgusted with myself to think of defending DJJ with all the things that have happened over the years,” said Sue Burrell, a lawyer at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, “but if you ask me right now, I would opt for keeping a very, very small DJJ open and not throwing the kids to the wolves.”
Burrell said she was concerned that prosecutors might see counties as unfit to handle serious offenders and thus try many juveniles as adults, forcing teenagers into adult prisons.
Barry Krisberg, a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said that keeping young offenders at the county level might offer them fewer rehabilitation options.
“I would bet that those kids would end up in juvenile hall, in isolation, getting fewer services,” Krisberg said. “I don’t think we can shut down the entire state system.”
But Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit group in San Francisco, said he believed young offenders could receive better support at the local level. “In county juvenile halls, you don’t have the entrenched gang culture and violence you have at the state youth authority,” Macallair said. “The counties can offer a continuum of options — maximum security, minimum security, intensive services in the community — that the state could never come close to matching.”
Macallair, who has called the state institutions “relics of the 19th century,” agreed that the proposed state closings presented challenges, but he said too much hand-wringing would keep resources at the state level and prevent needed changes.
“The state system is not set up for major change,” he said. “If the money won’t be flowing to counties, counties won’t get any better, and you’ll be left with the status quo.”
For years, the Division of Juvenile Justice has been in steady decline. The Preston Youth Correctional Facility, an hour northeast of Stockton, is scheduled to be shut down by June. It will be the ninth state youth detention facility to close since 2002. Only four will remain.
The population of young offenders in state care has plummeted since 1996, to 1,300 from 10,000, because of lower crime rates and laws mandating that only the most serious offenders remain in state custody. The vast majority of young offenders are held at county facilities.
DiazDeLeon, who was first arrested at 14 on a charge of attempted burglary, agrees with those who say the California youth justice system is obsolete.
“Kids are broken, kids are abused” coming into the state facilities, he said. “I was an abused child growing up into a wounded man.”
DiazDeLeon said the institution’s need to constantly quell the threat of violence meant he had essentially been left to rehabilitate himself.
“The correctional officers’ job was to keep control of the facility,” he said. “When I was there, they were told to do rehabilitation, but they didn’t fully engage in that because they didn’t really believe rehabilitation was possible for some of the young men there.”
If the counties are going to do better than the state, they will need more money and rehabilitation services to deal with young people for whom violence is common, said Donna Hitchens, a retired San Francisco judge who said she was among those who tried to avoid sending young offenders to state institutions.
“On a policy level, it’s a great idea,” Hitchens said. “But long-term treatment requires really strong programs in a secure setting, and a campus environment since they’re going to be there for so long.”
A memo released last week by the Chief Probation Officers of California after the Brown proposal was announced stated that county probation departments were ready to participate in the governor’s plan — with one major caveat. “We must be sure we can afford the new responsibilities the state contemplates for local probation,” the memo said.
Brown intends to compensate counties by extending existing sales tax and vehicle license fees, according to the California Department of Finance. The state’s 58 county probation departments would split $242 million in state money over the next four years.
In the 2003 Alameda County lawsuit, Judge Jon Tigar of Superior Court found that conditions at state youth institutions were unsafe and not conducive to rehabilitation. The court ordered the Division of Juvenile Justice to provide young offenders with vastly improved facilities, education and treatment programs.
In an interview before the announcement of Brown’s plan, a spokesman for the division, Bill Sessa, said that the state was in 85 percent compliance with the court’s mandates and that more changes were in progress.
“What may have been true more than a decade ago totally mischaracterizes the reality of the Division of Juvenile Justice today,” Sessa said.
He said he had no comment on Brown’s proposal to eliminate the Division of Juvenile Justice.
Based on his own experience incarcerated at state and county facilities, DiazDeLeon said counties should embrace the inevitable.
“I think DJJ can be replaced with something better within counties,” DiazDeLeon said. “Their model is outdated. You’re already coming from a dysfunctional background and going into dysfunctional system. What do you expect?”