It’s October, and LA County Juvenile Probation is Still Wrecking Kids

Two Op Eds in Sunday’s LA Times very eloquently and urgently called for sweeping changes in LA County’s hideously-troubled juvenile probation system.

One was by civil rights attorney Connie Rice, who reiterated what I hammered about last summer—that, even though there are two new good people at LA County’s probation’s helm, the problems in the juvenile side of the system are so great that we need aggressive federal oversight—sooner not later.

Here’s how Connie’s essay opens:

On a classroom wall of the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall where Los Angeles County houses — and is supposed to help — juvenile offenders, there is a sign that reads “No Reading Newspapers, No Cell Phone Use and No Alcohol Consumption During Class.”

The message is for the staff.

The sign was posted after the Department of Justice found serious problems with the county’s Department of Probation, including staff members drinking on the job and retaliating against whistle-blowers. The problems were so widespread that, in a 2004 memorandum of agreement, Justice Department officials required the Probation Department to “ensure that staff … do not maintain or consume alcohol at the camps” or “threaten and intimidate youth who report … mistreatment.”

Six years later, the department has even bigger problems. Employees have been charged with sexually exploiting the youths in their custody, pepper-spraying them inappropriately and staging fights between kids.

After a decade of federal prodding, multiple civil rights lawsuits, muzzled warnings from the L.A. County Commission for Children and Families, deflected whistle-blower actions, dozens of unheeded Board of Supervisors resolutions and a spate of embarrassing news articles, the Probation Department’s malpractice continues. Which means children in county custody are still committing suicide, dying from untreated illnesses, being “jumped” into gangs at the camps, receiving “diplomas” while still illiterate, being held in solitary confinement without needed mental health treatment and cycling directly into adult prison. As Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas recently revealed, the department even fails to feed its wards meals that meet minimal state nutrition requirements…..

Read the rest.

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A BLUEPRINT FOR SAVING A LIFE

The second op ed is by Sal Martinez, a former gang member turned father, working man, and community leader. (I know Sal and think the world of him.)

Martinez writes of how at one time, the camps were actually better, and that, for him, a great probation camp counselor and an even more remarkable juvenile probation officer, the late Mary Ridgway, saved his life—or more accurately showed him that he could save his own life.

Here’s a clip:

When I visit the camps — which I do from time to time as a community volunteer — I see probation officers dressed in combat boots and fatigues acting like soldiers, not teachers. No one is talking to the kids. Sometimes, they are left to just sit around doing nothing. Many kids today cycle through the camps so quickly that they don’t get a chance to take a real break from the street and open themselves to another, less destructive path.

These kids may have committed violent crimes. But they aren’t all that different from the gangsters I grew up with. What they need is to be treated like human beings by adults who care about them and want to help them change.

There is a blueprint for doing that. I know. I was once part of this system. And it saved my life.

Read the rest.

This is an essential issue. Lives and futures are at stake. Let us hope that the powers that be are reading—and re-reading—what Sal and Connie have written.