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According to the Office of the Inspector General, which conducted the audit last year, the CYA has failed to end its practice of confining troublesome wards in their cells for 23 hours a day, is falling short of complying with minimal standards in providing education services and is taking too long to assess and treat youthful offenders with mental health problems.

Altogether, the audit found that CYA has substantially complied with only 57 percent of the 241 recommendations forwarded to it by the inspector general in nine reviews over the previous four years.

"I guess the bottom line here is that they still have a long way to go," said Inspector General Matthew Cate, in assessing whether the CYA is getting better or worse at meeting its mandate of rehabilitating the 3,588 wards under its care.

The CYA came under heavy criticism last year as a result of inmate
suicides, high levels of violence in its maximum-security units and
allegations of excessive force. Two months ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised reforms in settling a lawsuit against the agency and agreeing to a consent decree designed to emphasize rehabilitation as CYA's best path toward public safety.

Most recently, the CYA came under fire last week when two wards - one of them a convicted murderer - walked away from a public service coat giveaway project at Cal Expo. The two wards are still at large.

CYA Director Walter Allen III, appointed to his post last year, said Monday he welcomed the inspector general's most recent report, saying there is no disagreement from him that the agency is "in crisis and needs a major overhaul."

Allen said he has appointed new superintendents to take charge of each of the CYA's eight institutions, banished some of the agency's more controversial practices, such as confining some violence-prone inmates into telephone booth-sized cages for educational classes, and tried to bring in parents to sit on "family councils" to provide input into the agency's operations.

"We've made a lot of headway," Allen said. "But unfortunately, the
inspector general can't say, 'These are the things you have done.' That's not their job. We have done a lot of positive things this year, but you know what? I'm not going to be totally satisfied until we change our way of doing business."

The 251-page inspector general's audit listed the prolonged periods of time some wards spend in administrative detention and the shortcomings in education and mental health treatment as the most serious problems still facing the CYA.

In five of the eight CYA youth prisons it audited, the inspector general found that 9 percent of the wards are still spending 23 hours a day in their cells. While administrative lockdowns are supposed to be reserved for the most severe disciplinary cases, the audit found that 103 wards at the Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino were being confined for no other reason than that there weren't enough teachers at the institution to run their educational classes.

At the N.A. Chaderjian facility in Stockton, there were 39 inmateswho had been on 23-hour lockdowns for a month or more. Inspector General Cate said he doesn't think that even the most disruptive inmate should be held in isolation facilities for more than three consecutive days. Even then, Cate said, the inmates should be allowed out of their cells for at least three hours a day.

"The long-term use of this practice needs to end," Cate said. "At a
minimum, you need to make sure they get out more than an hour a day. The Youth Authority needs to be committed to making progress in handling these wards in a more progressive way."

The audit found that the CYA "continues to fail" in getting large numbers of high school wards their state-mandated four hours of education time a day. As a result, test scores are dropping while the number of offenders slipping below the 25th percentile on the national average is rising at two Southern California institutions surveyed.

In the mental health areas, the CYA "also is not consistently providing wards with mandated treatment services," the inspector general's audit found. Only a third of the wards at the Stark youth prison in Chino were receiving counseling. At the Southern California reception center, 82 percent of incoming wards had not been diagnostically assessed within 45 days of their commitment to CYA, the audit said.

CYA critics said the audit provides another key piece of evidence - along with several "expert reports" filed in the lawsuit that led up to the consent decree - that the agency is stumbling in its mission.

"This thing is broken," said state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-East Los Angeles. "I mean, it's broken."

Sara Norman of the Prison Law Office, which brought the suit that resulted in the consent decree, said the audit shows that the CYA, as it exists, is "completely unworkable."

"There are good people working to shore up the foundation," Norman said. "But it's crumbling."

CYA director Allen, however, said the organization is still pushing forward with a reform agenda but that substantive change is going to take time.

"There's no way of taking 25, 30 years of problems and fixing them in a few months or a year," Allen said. "But I am absolutely, wholeheartedly committed to changing our way of doing business."

This is the link to the Inspector General's Report on the CYA:

http://www.oig.ca.gov/pdf
/AccountabilityAudit-CYA.pdf

Sacramento Bee: Published 2:15 am PST Tuesday, January 4, 2005