The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Mercury News Posted on Sun, Jul. 30, 2006
New juvenile hall delivers a message
SKYLIGHTS, SOFTER COLORS EVIDENT
By Karen de Sá
Mercury News

New architecture for juvenile justice is nearing completion in the foothills of San Mateo County -- designed to give young offenders the support they need to turn away from crime and thrive.

At the county's new $148 million youth services complex, the premise is treatment, not punishment, and the message is delivered in the very walls: soothing pastels to calm testy moods, skylights letting in swaths of sunlight and open space for stretching growing muscles.

Unlike other California counties that are greatly expanding their juvenile halls, San Mateo added only a few lockup beds and instead created homier settings for girls, substance abusers and the mentally ill. The juvenile hall is surrounded by a network of services for young people in trouble, from run-amok kids who exhaust their parents to teens who kill.

The complex, whose first phase opens in September, is already eliciting praise from advocates and justice officials statewide.

``What they're doing is not just building a juvenile hall. They've really focused on very troubled populations and treatment options to serve those kids locally, close to home,'' said Norma Suzuki, executive director of the Chief Probation Officers of California. ``Other counties are doing things, but not on this scale.''

The current juvenile hall, built in 1948 with low ceilings and dark, twisting hallways, became legendary for snakes in the showers and rats squeezing through holes in the walls. With no central heating or air conditioning at the hall, youths and the staff complain of near-constant discomfort.

A group of teenage boys interviewed inside the hall's D-unit described nauseating smells and thick grime in the corners of their cells. They said they get irritable when it's hot, fighting with the staff and their roommates.

Enhance treatment

``The building we had said: `We don't care about kids and families,' '' said juvenile Judge Marta Diaz. ``We've tried to do treatment in spite of the building. Now we'll have buildings that enhance and harmonize the treatment we want to provide.''

When complete, the campus off Highway 92 will include a 180-bed juvenile hall for both sexes, a 30-bed girls' camp, a 24-bed group home, a community school for students expelled from their districts, and a 12- to 15-bed receiving home for abused and neglected children.

Throughout the state, new lockups for violators ages 11 to 19 are bigger, cleaner and more secure, with additional space for school and treatment. More than three dozen counties have rebuilt or remodeled juvenile facilities since the late 1990s, and eight counties, including San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and San Francisco, are completing projects.

Yet most are versions of adult jails -- rows of bare cinder-block cells with bunks and steel toilets. And when one-time state and federal grants became available for improvements, most counties choose to expand -- doubling or even tripling the number of beds -- despite evidence that juvenile crime has been on a downward slide.

A lawsuit filed in April by the Prison Law Office alleges years of poor state oversight of eight county juvenile halls, including Alameda's. The advocacy group cites evidence of unsanitary and inhumane conditions, including walls smeared with feces, an abundant use of pepper spray and crowded classrooms and exercise yards.

Bigger facilities

New construction might remedy some of these problems. But the massive sizes of many facilities might create new problems, said Dan Macallair, executive director of San Francisco's Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Bigger facilities mean higher operating costs and less money for programs such as anger management and vocational training.

``You've got these spanking new facilities all over the state and they're sitting there, a lot of them only half-full,'' Macallair said. ``So it's made conditions perhaps a little better for some of these kids who otherwise would have been in decrepit facilities, but it hasn't improved the programming.''

Macallair said officials failed to consider the steady drop in juvenile crime when they built big. Last month, his center reported that California's juvenile crime rates are among the lowest recorded since 1960.

That leaves counties like Santa Clara -- focused for years on detention alternatives -- sitting on new, empty space. By fall, the Guadalupe Parkway juvenile hall will have a capacity of 390, even though the hall population averages about 250.

Probation officials plan to turn one of the empty units into a tutoring center and use the other one as an alternative to state prison for the most serious and violent offenders.

San Mateo County officials began building with the conviction that locking up more kids would not reduce crime. The new juvenile hall is 17 beds larger than the old -- just enough to make the project eligible for public funding
-- and tried to soften the features. Young people can spend up to three years in county custody, so the experience is critical in determining whether they'll veer away from crime or get deeper into it.

``I have nothing but praise for the way the county has gone about doing this project,'' said Gerry Hilliard, managing attorney of the Private Defender Program, who has 25 years' experience defending juveniles. The county, led by Judge Diaz, Probation Chief Loren Buddress and Supervisor Rich Gordon, ``talked about the needs of kids before they talked about the kinds of buildings they were going to build,'' he said.

After the first phase opens in September, few girls will be locked up. Instead, these offenders -- most victims of sexual and physical abuse -- will live in a sage-green circle of buildings resembling a boarding school, whose courses include overcoming post-traumatic stress and sustainable gardening.

Youths who are mentally ill and addicted to drugs also will be moved from cells into homelike settings to live in small groups.

Below the standard

The new juvenile hall, like many others in the state, does not meet American Correctional Association standards that say these facilities should serve no more than 150 people, with no more than 16 beds per living unit.

But the county tried to create some semblance of normality, designing the complex to resemble a small village, with buildings circling an athletic field and no razor-wire in sight.

Some offenders will walk freely across the campus to the dining hall and school. If they bump into a rival gang member -- just like they might on the streets -- they'll be expected to say ``excuse me'' and keep walking. If they fight, they lose the privilege of free movement.

Inside, wavy ceilings will muffle the din of noisy teenagers. The walls and carpets are yellow, green, blue and purple, with lively patterns to lighten the moods of the depressed and angry. And there's more natural light, which experts say helps adolescents process and absorb information.

For the first time, young offenders will have desks, pencils, sinks and mirrors in their rooms. A new visiting area will allow extended families to visit for the first time; currently, there is room only for parents.

Nonetheless, nine incarcerated teenagers interviewed for this story expressed concern about moving to the new facility. Certainly, there's fear of the unknown: Many have been in and out of the hall for years and have a certain affection for its funky-but-familiar look. Under a court order, the juveniles' names are not being used.

One 17-year-old scheduled to move to the girls' camp said she was worried at first about the possibility of ``a finger-in-your-face kind of thing.'' She's been in and out of lockups since age 13 for drugs and fighting, and on her dad's side of the family, jails and prisons are nothing new.

But after she toured the girls' camp, her mood picked up. She said she envisioned herself acting differently in a new environment.

``I would really feel comfortable here,'' she said. ``But at the same time you'd always have to remember you're not home -- which would be kind of hard, too.''
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Karen de Sá at kdesa@mercurynews.com or (650) 688-7550.