The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The state is spending almost $180,000 per youth offender this fiscal year --five times the cost of keeping inmates in the adult prisons -- and thegovernor projects that figure will rise to $216,000 next year. The Divisionof Juvenile Justice's budget this year totals $530 million. State officialssay new programs are being implemented, under pressure from the courts, butin a marked change from the past, some key lawmakers say they have lost hopein the Schwarzenegger administration.

"Today, I am very skeptical that they're going to be able to do what they'vesaid they would," said Sen. Michael Machado, D-Linden (San Joaquin County),a supporter of prison reform. "They are doomed to failure. There is atremendous lack of concern for getting results. Nothing has happened."

Some members of the Legislature are so frustrated that they are urging astep that at one time would have been unthinkable -- dismantling thejuvenile prison system.

The Assembly's Public Safety Committee recently passed a bill that wouldshut down the eight juvenile prisons and send the offenders to their homecounties for treatment or detention. The bill's prospects are uncertain, butseveral experts described it as a vivid symbol of the loss of confidence inthe governor and the dire prospects of the thousands of youths trapped in the state system.

"I think it's hopeless," said David Steinhart, executive director of
Commonweal's Juvenile Justice Program, a San Francisco-based nonprofit thathas worked closely with the Legislature to develop reform plans. "What theyare doing is a formula for disaster. It's not working on any front."

Since agreeing to a consent decree in 2004, settling a class action law suitfiled in Superior Court in Alameda County, Schwarzenegger's administrationhas repeatedly been ordered to introduce fundamental reforms in the system,but the situation appears to be getting worse. Violence is still rising. Ananalysis prepared for the court by a panel of experts last year comparedCalifornia's system with other states and concluded that the state, once anational leader, now lags in nearly every category except cost.

"California is failing its children," the report concluded.

It added, "California is failing its taxpayers."

On a recent visit to the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility inChino, a drab campus of old, worn structures east of Los Angeles, every wardinterviewed -- the juvenile offenders, some as old as 25, are called wards,not inmates -- described frequent, unpredictable violence as an unceasingelement of prison life.

"It's just there all the time," said Felix Faustino, 21, serving a sentencefor assault with a deadly weapon. "You have to really want to stay out ofthat or you're going to get hit. It happens.

"Some of the guys try to get locked up just for protection," he said,
referring to segregation units reserved for troublemakers, in which thewards are usually locked in their cells for 22 or 23 hours a day. "But whenyou're locked up, there's no school, no nothing."

Brandon Gilmore, who is 20 and in the Chino prison for murder, said it isstill common to see wards suddenly charge across a yard to attack anopposing gang member or someone of a different race. The violence, he andothers said, is almost always between blacks and Latinos.

"They can't stop it," Gilmore said.

But what is particularly disheartening about the problems, many experts say,is that they come at a time when there ought to be great hope. The state'sadult prisons are in crisis because of enormous overcrowding, but thepopulation in the juvenile prisons is not just declining, it has been
plummeting for a decade.

From a peak of slightly more than 10,000 wards in 1996, the population ofjuvenile offenders has declined to 2,551 as of last month. In addition,juvenile crime rates are at their lowest levels in 40 years, even with arecent uptick. The youth arrest rate for serious felonies has dropped bymore than half from 1988 to 2006. Experts say they are not certain about thereasons behind those sharp drops, but many speculate that the crack epidemicmay have artificially inflated rates earlier, and that the generally strongeconomy as well as declining rates of teen pregnancy have contributed to the
big declines.

The steep drop in the juvenile prison population should be easing pressureson the state, providing an unparalleled opportunity to implement bettermethods. In at least one level of the system, there has been progress. Overthe past decade, most of the counties have embraced fundamentally newrehabilitation methods -- referred to as evidence-based programs -- thathave proved successful around the country at reducing recidivism rates. Thestate, however, has remained strikingly resistant to change.

"Those state facilities are the absolute last place you want to send a kid,"said Jerry Powers, chief probation officer in Stanis- laus County andoutgoing president of the Chief Probation Officers of California. "The stateis the last resort. We do a much better job treating them in the counties,and we use far more successful approaches."

The counties usually turn to the state prisons out of desperation, expertssay, and the decline in the juvenile prison population reflects that.

"A lot of the decline is just a response to what gulags these state
facilities have become," said Bart Lubow, director of the program for
high-risk youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, based in Baltimore, whichhas become a major force in funding reform programs. "The counties justwon't send their kids there because they're so bad."

Last fall, California provided the state court monitoring the consent decreesix reform plans covering everything from education and medical care tomental health treatment. State officials say it will take three to fouryears to improve things.

"In an ideal world, we'd shut the system down and start over, but we can'tdo that, so we have to move very carefully," said Bernard Warner, the headof the Department of Juvenile Justice.

Warner added, "What you see are well-intentioned people moving forward.There are no shortcuts. These things take time. We want to fundamentallychange the system."

Part of the problem, state officials say, is simply getting competent staff.The six reform plans rely on dozens of new managers and counselors, but thecritical position of a chief of programs remains vacant and 83 percent ofthe new staff positions created to support the changes remain unfilled,according to a recent court filing.

The filing also included a list of deadlines for action that the state hadeither missed or not completed; it ran 11 pages.

According to the report last year by the outside experts, vocational classessit mostly empty at the prisons, the offenders spend exceedingly long stretches of time doing little, and there is "abysmal achievement" in theeducation programs. The report also said there is a "capitulation to gang culture."

It was not always this way. California was a national leader in juvenilerehabilitation in the 1960s and the early 1970s. But it then adopted a morepunitive approach, and rehabilitation programs atrophied.

"I go to California and tell them about things that were developed in theirstate years ago and then were forgotten," said Edward Latessa, a
criminologist at the University of Cincinnati and a highly regarded pioneerin developing new rehabilitation models. "There's a lot of ground to makeup."

The state's Office of the Inspector General issued in March the latest in astring of critical reports on the juvenile prisons. The report focused onconditions at the Stark facility, and it found that hundreds of the wardsreceived little education, many were locked in their cells up to 22 hoursper day and large numbers kept contraband such as rope in their cells.

Ramon Martinez, the superintendent at Stark, said he found the report to beexaggerated. He conceded that there was an unacceptable level of violence,but he insisted there was marked improvement in the past year. He also saidhe was introducing new programs and hiring more professionals to providerehabilitation. The facility has gone from two full-time psychologists to12, he said.

Warner said Stark was also doing a better job of separating low-risk wardsfrom higher-risk ones, which makes for a calmer environment. Warner said heis eager to provide more treatment programs, but that there are barriers.For instance, he said, some of the wards do not want to go to classes out offear for their safety.

"We need to temper some expectations," Warner said.

What particularly irritates some lawmakers is that the state does such apoor job in spite of the sky-high costs. The December court report foundthat violence had risen nearly 10 percent in the first half of 2006 from the year earlier.

Martinez, the superintendent at Stark, which has 780 wards, said the figuresdo not take account of the fact that the wards in his facility tend to besome of the toughest criminals in the state.

"Something happens when they go through these doors," Martinez said. "Theylose their values. We know they have them, and they can find them. But theylose them when they come in."

The atmosphere at Stark can be intimidating. On a recent morning, a fewwards worked in vocational classes, where they were being taught skillsranging from bricklaying to sheet-metal work. In the living units, the wardsfrequently beat violently against the tiny slitlike windows of their cellsand shouted through the heavy steel doors when a visitor walked by.

In a wing for sex offenders, several cells were opened for viewing. They were dank concrete cubes, roughly 7 feet in each direction, with open steeltoilets in the corner. The beds were concrete platforms with thin plasticmats.

Harley Finney, 24, a white ward imprisoned for aggravated mayhem, said thatthe black-versus-Latino mentality is the source of most assaults at Stark.

"You don't need a reason" for one side to attack the other, Finney said.

Waymon Moore, 22, who is black and in Stark for assault, said he enjoyedbeing in a special wing for lower-risk offenders because of the relativecalm.

"You get out of here, into the general population, it's for real, man,"
Moore said. "You can get it anytime."
Coming next

In part two of its look at juvenile justice, The Chronicle examines how
counties have adopted new treatment methods to reduce recidivism rates among
offenders. The approaches are far more pragmatic than in the past and
emphasize retraining rather than punishment.

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This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
JUVENILE JUSTICE
A new approach to help young offenders
County programs try to keep youths away from violent prisons

James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Juvenile Crime on the Decline.

(05-08) 04:00 PDT Watsonville -- Second of Two Parts

A group of young men laughed over a game of pingpong at a storefront space here recently and several others loudly attacked bags of snacks, but one teenager sat intently in front of a chessboard. Silent, he betrayed emotion only when his opponent, his counselor, got up to make a phone call.

"Hurry back so I can finish you off," he joked.

It could have been any group of teenagers blowing off steam until the 17-year-old chess player tugged up a pant leg, exposing the court-ordered electronic monitoring device wrapped around his ankle, a product of an arrest, his fifth, for alcohol- and drug-related crimes. One of the pingpong players was finishing a term for weapons possession, and the others had been arrested, some repeatedly, on charges ranging from burglary to assault.

Relaxed as the atmosphere may have seemed, the youths in this Santa Cruz County program were symbols of deep shifts that have been transforming the juvenile justice system in many California counties.

"Five years ago, all these kids would have been in detention, in juvenile hall or somewhere else, all of them," said Fernando Giraldo, director of what is called an evening reporting center in Watsonville. "We do everything now to keep them out of the system, and the results have just been completely better."

For the past decade, a system once marked by little but despair has experienced a series of positive changes, and one reason, many experts say, is that the counties have been sending fewer juvenile offenders every year to the state-run juvenile prison system and instead placing them in rehabilitation programs in their home counties. The offenders are generally arrested and adjudicated by county law enforcement authorities, and prosecutors and judges have wide discretion in how and where to handle them.

More and more, those local officials are opting to treat the youths at home at a time when juvenile crime rates, and imprisonment rates, have been plummeting for a decade. Experts say there is no clear explanation for the trends, but many speculate that the generally strong economy, which has meant steady job growth, and declines in teen pregnancy rates have been factors.

The shifts have been profound. There were 65 juveniles imprisoned in 2006 for every 100,000 in the state's youth population, down from a peak of 285 in 1988, while the juvenile arrest rate for serious felonies has fallen by more than half, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonprofit research group in San Francisco.

California's state-run juvenile prisons continue to be plagued by violence and poor rehabilitation efforts, but the counties have seized on new methods and accelerated the introduction of models that appear to be successful at reducing recidivism rates.

Keeping youthful offenders locked up, once common, is now shunned in all but the most extreme cases. Treatment methods are far more pragmatic than in the past and focus on retraining rather than punishment. There is widespread agreement among experts that supportive programs that focus on teaching young offenders new skills are far more effective.

What experts find most striking is that the trends were so unexpected. A decade ago, when crime rates had spiked, some criminologists argued that the only way to protect the public was incarcerating as many juvenile offenders as possible. Now law enforcement officials are finding that, in general, the fewer youths they incarcerate -- while providing treatment -- the more they enhance public safety.

"This is the huge, untold story of the corrections system," said Barry Krisberg, president of Oakland-based National Council on Crime and Delinquency. "What we're seeing is the exact reverse of the old argument that said the only thing that works is incapacitating these juveniles. The crime rates are falling as we got less tough, not tougher."

County probation departments are much more willing to place offenders, even repeat offenders, in day-treatment programs like the one in Watsonville -- not out of kindness, experts say, but because it works.

"We have realized we were locking up kids we didn't need to lock up, especially girls," said Donald Coleman, the supervising juvenile court judge in Ventura County and a former prosecutor. "You don't want to separate them from their families if you can help it. As a judge in an adult case you would never get me to approve electronic monitoring for a serious crime, never. But I think it's a great thing for juveniles because it keeps them with their families. "

Said Daniel Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, "This is one of the biggest developments in the history of the system. This goes against everything we thought was needed, essentially. This refutes 30 years of social policy."

A look at a day treatment center in Monrovia, in Los Angeles County near Pasadena, displays another element in the new approach. The center, operated by the Boys Republic group, a nonprofit that runs a string of successful programs for offenders, is open and relaxed.

During a recent group session, a dozen offenders worked with one of the teenagers who had blown up at some classmates earlier in the day. The young woman has a serious methamphetamine problem and a pattern of angry outbursts. But her classmates helped her understand that she had misread comments by some of the other kids, and they discussed strategies for avoiding such miscommunication in the future. The emphasis was on pragmatic solutions to stressful problems.

"It's all about trust with them, and when they feel that, they can move to the next step," said Bob Falk, the director.

But the signs of innovation at the Boys Republic program were best symbolized by the things that were not present. There were no guards, no bars on the windows and no weapons. There is virtually no violence, Falk says.

Perhaps the biggest shift over the past decade is the rapidly declining role of the state in the treatment of juvenile offenders. Today, in part because of dismal conditions in state-run juvenile prisons, only a tiny number of juvenile offenders are sent to the state lockups. Of the 219,000 juveniles arrested in California in 2005, for instance, just 636 were sent to state prisons.

Instead, most offenders now stay in their home counties, and most are placed in day programs because of growing evidence that they produce, in general, the best results.

"The counties are the only ones really changing and they have to be encouraged," said David Steinhart, head of the nonprofit Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program in San Francisco. "The future is with the counties, not the state."

Even so, officials say it is growing increasingly difficult because the offenders entering the system today are, in many instances, far more troubled than youths in the past. A study of the juvenile offenders in Santa Clara County found that 60 percent had mental disorders, about 70 percent had high levels of drug and alcohol abuse and nearly 80 percent reported suffering serious traumas.

For many of these youths, the focus of their lives is not succeeding, it is surviving. At the afternoon reporting center in Watsonville, for instance, dinner began recently with each of the offenders mentioning one thing they were thankful for.

Most of the youths said they appreciated the food. A boy who is about to end his term thought for a moment and then said, "I'm thankful for still being alive."

Even so, the improvements have been real. There have been such dramatic declines in the number of juveniles locked up in juvenile halls and other county facilities that the counties are having trouble adjusting.

For instance, Ventura County completed construction just three years ago of a 420-bed juvenile hall; it has never been more than half full. Orange County has experienced booming population growth over the past decade, but the population of the county's juvenile hall has dropped to 450 from 520.

Santa Cruz County's juvenile hall held as many as 65 offenders a decade ago. Today, it holds 20.

Despite the progress, some experts complain that the counties have done a far better job of talking about the new rehabilitation theories than implementing them.

For instance, Santa Clara County has enthusiastically embraced the new methods, referred to as evidence-based programs because they rely heavily on statistical proof of what works and what does not, much like medical care. The county has been placing fewer juveniles in detention, but a consultant's report said that the county was still detaining a higher percentage of its offenders than other counties and that their stays were longer than the average.

"It can take a couple of years to really design the models properly and then to train all the staff the way they need to be," said Kathy Duque, the county's deputy chief probation officer.

The core of the new approach is this: Experts relying on extensive research have found that juveniles with the potential for becoming lifelong criminals can be identified early with careful screening. They frequently exhibit consistent patterns of truancy, vandalism and drug abuse and often come from abusive environments.

Once identified, these youths can be treated with programs that focus not on lengthy analysis of their often troubled backgrounds but on practical efforts to break behavior patterns and make better choices. This is known as behavioral, or cognitive therapy.

"Talk therapy doesn't work in changing behavior," said Edward Latessa, head of the criminal justice department at the University of Cincinnati and a pioneer in the new methods. "You have to target current issues in the juvenile's life, not things that happened in the past, even if they affected the juvenile's psychology in some way."

The treatment also focuses not on the individual offender alone, but the family, when possible. And a key concern is separating youths who may be more inclined to become repeat offenders, so-called high-risk offenders, from the others.

"You don't want to overtreat a kid who doesn't need it," said Duque. "You can actually make things worse. You want to focus on the kids who really need it."

The changes began in the early 1990s, when juvenile crime had spiked and some experts argued that a new generation of "super predators" could only be stopped by large-scale incarceration. In an influential article titled "America's Ticking Crime Bomb and How to Defuse It," written in 1994, John DiIulio, a criminologist, insisted efforts at rehabilitation were misguided.

"We ... need more cops, more prisons, and less 1960s style nonsense about the "root causes" of crime," wrote DiIulio.

That same year, officials in Orange County struggled with the problem of soaring juvenile arrests and soaring costs.

"We found that turnkey, locking them up, does not work, period," said Colleene Preciado, the chief probation officer. "They were just going to get out and start all over again."

So the county began a research campaign and found that just 8 percent of the juvenile offenders were committing more than 50 percent of the crimes. In response, assessment schemes were devised to identify prospective repeat offenders early and to focus treatment programs on those individuals, and their families, to try to prevent the cycle of crime from getting started.

It was a model that quickly spread to other counties. It is working so well that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed moving some of the younger inmates in the adult correction system to the counties so these offenders can be placed in the more successful rehabilitation programs.

"It's been a huge journey," said Judy Cox, the chief probation officer in Santa Cruz County. "We've worked very hard to change our thinking completely. I am in touch with people and research that I never would have put my hands on earlier in my career."

She added, "I don't think we can ever go back to where we were."

E-mail James Sterngold at jsterngold@sfchronicle.com.

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This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle