Two years ago, on March 7, 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors directed the LA County Probation Department to develop what they called a “Global Plan” to reorganize and move incarcerated youth between the county’s juvenile halls and camps. The board wanted this plan to address an influx of kids from the state’s youth prison system — then in the process of permanently shutting down — as well as a host of problems causing substandard care of youth who were already in the county’s facilities.
Last week, the Youth Justice Coalition and other advocates continued to put pressure on the supervisors and the probation department to toss out the Global Plan. Members of YJC, many of whom have personal experience with the county’s criminal legal system, are urging the board and probation officials to forget about shuffling kids around and instead prioritize decarceration.
Years of poor conditions in LA’s youth lockups
As WLA has long reported, the county’s youth probation system has been plagued with a chronic series of problems. There are critical staffing issues, despite budget increases. And on multiple occasions, LA’s juvenile halls have been declared “unsuitable” for youth altogether.
Most recently, in October 2024, the Board of State and Community Corrections told LA County officials that the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall was unsuitable for the 260 youth in residence. The county was given 60 days to correct the conditions that resulted in the “unsuitable” rating, or the BSCC would require probation to move the facility’s youth residents into a facility that was in compliance — although what that facility might be wasn’t entirely clear.
However, instead of taking swift action to make Los Padrinos habitable, five days after the 60-day deadline had passed, the LA County Supervisors agreed that the BSCC was to blame for the poor rating, not the county. The BSCC responded with a public statement about the county’s actions.
Poor conditions in the halls have meant that kids miss out on recreation and exercise, programs, doctor’s appointments, school, and even trips to the bathroom. BSCC inspections found kids “forced to urinate in receptacles, and feces and urine-soaked towels found on the floor of children’s rooms because there were no staff available to escort them to the bathroom safely.”
These are not the worst conditions youth have endured in the county’s juvenile halls in just the last few years. Incarcerated teens have experienced sexual assault and drug overdoses, as well as physical violence.
Just two weeks ago, on March 3, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the unsealing of a grand jury indictment against 30 detention services officers from Los Padrinos who are accused of facilitating and encouraging dozens of gladiator-style fights between kids at the juvenile hall during the second half of 2023.
Probation has had years, under frequently changing leadership, to turn things around, and has, thus far, failed to do so.
The department’s current leader, Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa says the Global Plan will make it easier for probation to provide appropriate care and tailored programs to incarcerated youth, and will hopefully help the department come into compliance with the BSCC.
The shuffle
Under the probation department’s Global Plan, all pre-disposition boys (approximately 250 kids) will be held at Los Padrinos. Boys with high mental health needs will move to the Dorothy Kirby Center, which currently houses girls. All girls and gender-expansive youth held at Los Padrinos and the Dorothy Kirby Center will be moved to Campus Kilpatrick. Those boys currently at Kilpatrick will be sent to the dangerous Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall.
Viera Rosa says all this shuffling will allow the probation department to reduce the population at Los Padrinos and “consolidate young people with like needs.” The new plan, Viera Rosa told commissioners and community members at a Probation Oversight Commission Meeting on March 13, does take into consideration the county’s goals to ensure kids receive better care, services, and rehabilitative programs. The plan is built on the idea that keeping youth in smaller “communities” will “best serve the youth that we have and will create an environment in which they can be better prepared when they leave,” Viera Rosa said.
One of the department’s goals is to do a better job of meeting kids’ specific needs, according to the probation chief. “The [Global Plan] doesn’t go into what our future endeavors are going to be to do better needs assessments and to do dynamic assessments, so that we know what programming to contract with — that’s part of it, but you don’t see it in here [in the Global Plan] because it’s a facilities plan.”
There are a lot of changes to the care of kids in juvenile carceral facilities that the plan only “hints at” because the Global Plan was requested specifically as a “facilities plan,” Viera Rosa told the commissioners. The specifics, he said, would be fleshed out later with other county leaders and private vendors.
The vague details and lack of collaboration in developing the plan did not sit well with the board of supervisors or the oversight commission.
When Viera Rosa first presented his plan in February, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath told him she could not support the plan in its current form, and expressed alarm that the probation department did not receive input from county departments, service providers, the board of supervisors, or the community while developing this plan.
“I do want to thank the department for finally sharing the Global Plan. I know this is something I’ve been asking for, though I am deeply disappointed that at this point in time, this is the best Global Plan the department is able to submit,” Supervisor Horvath said. “In this Global Plan, the board was looking for a long-term plan that would break down silos between departments, modernize operations across services provided by multiple departments in a care-first framework. What I understand is before us today is something that was developed by probation alone.”
Back at the Probation Oversight Commission meeting, Commissioner Esche Jackson questioned Viera Rosa about why the plan didn’t include more of the specifics around the actual care youth would receive.
“So superficially, the plan just aims to do what’s necessary, reconfigure the populations, move people around, update the setting, so that you can reach compliance?” Jackson asked. “Is that the primary objective?”
Compliance with the BSCC’s minimum standards was a “strong component” of the plan, which considers staffing and other compliance challenges, replied Viera Rosa. It will reduce the population at Los Padrinos, and consolidate groups of kids with similar needs. “Not every youth has the same needs,” said the chief. And the way kids are currently housed in the county’s facilities makes it difficult to provide appropriate programs and services. “What you end up doing is the wrong prescription,” Viera Rosa said. “It’s the wrong class for the wrong kid.”
The right prescription would be to stop incarcerating kids, community members argue
Community leaders who addressed the LA County Board of Supervisors and probation officials in February and March, argued that the new Global Plan ignores the fact that the county has committed to focusing on keeping kids in their communities and out of the juvenile halls and camps.
The Youth Justice Coalition’s organizing director, Tauheedah Shakur, called the Global Plan just another “tactic to keep young people locked away,” when she addressed the supervisors last month.
“Right now, of the 50 girls being sent to Kilpatrick, 27 are pre-dispositioned, meaning they haven’t even been sentenced yet and should be in community-based care,” she said. “This is an injustice.”
This piece of the plan goes against the LA County Board of Supervisors’ commitment to the decarceration of girls and gender-expansive youth by this year, DeAnna Pittman, Program Manager of Youth Leadership and Policy at the Young Women’s Freedom Center pointed out during the public comment period of the Probation Commission meeting. Her organization, she said, was very concerned about the plan to move all girls and gender-expansive youth to Camp Kilpatrick. “It’s now 2025, and we’re talking about solidifying and cementing” the incarceration of these youth, Pittman said. Instead, time and resources should be put into “finding girls and gender expansive youth who can come home today.”
The probation department, according to YJC’s Tauheedah Shakur, continues to prove that it cannot properly care for youth in custody. “Yet it’s still trusted to make decisions that affect their futures.”