Before you read this, please sit down and do not consume any kind of food or beverage that might induce choking. Remove all sharp objects from your immediate reach.
Okay, ready?
This week, California’s Little Hoover Commission issued a report called Juvenile Justice Reform: Realigning Responsibilities.. In it they recommended that, by 2011, the state should phase out its crumbling and chronically-troubled juvenile facilities and transfer those high risk and high needs juvenile offenders within the state’s care to the various county facilities (transferring the needed state funds along with the kids).
The Little Hoover Commission, for those who don’t know, is an independent, bipartisan state oversight agency created in 1962 with the mission to “investigate state government operations.” Over the decades, the Little Hoover folks have proven themselves to be a remarkably level-headed watch dog group with a good record for calling things pretty accurately.
Okay, so back to the report: The commission had several reasons for their recommendation that the state get out of the juvenile incarceration business. For one thing, while the troubled facilities were making improvements (in response to repeated legal pressure), the kid inmates did not seem to be getting the services they needed (see below), and conditions at the aging faciliies were still so hideous that, next week, lawyers will argue in Alameda County Superior Court that the whole system is irretrievably broken and should be put immediately into federal receivership.
(This past February, I posted about the ghastly state of California’s juvenile facilities. In brief, according to a February 2007 report the state’s largest juvenile prison, Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, provided virtually no education services to its wards, allowed them to keep makeshift ropes in their cells and kept most of them locked up 22 hours a day. Other facilities had other horror stories. A year later, the 2008 report indicated that the system’s failures were still “pervasive, severe and chronic.”)
But here’s the part that may cause you to need the Heimlich maneuver: The commission also thought that, given the questionable care and services, and given the lousy outcomes the state system seems to produce in terms of rehabilitation (three out of four juveniles released from the facilities commit new crimes within three years) that the system’s yearly budget was a bit on the high side—namely $372 million per year to service 1500 kids.
Now let’s do the math, shall we? Let’s see….. 372 million divided by 1500 = $252 thousand per kid per year.
Yes, you read correctly: The state of California is spending TWO-HUNDRED AND FIFTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS PER KID per annum to incarcerate its juvenile offenders.
In their report, the commission even has a nice pie chart to show how the quarter-million per kid cost breaks out. The numbers are as follows:
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1. $43,180 – facilities, administration, support.
This number is for everything having to do with the functioning of the building, the administration, support staff, food, and that sort of thing—basically the cost of keeping the kid there and running the place. Of course, that’s higher than a year’s worth of mortgage payments plus utilities and groceries for a working-class family of four, but okay. We’ll take them at their word.
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2. $37,490 – security.
Say what? It costs nearly $40 grand per year to guard each kid? Really? Since it costs a total of $35,000 per big, bad, possibly EME-affiliated adult inmate per year for housing, food, administration, medical, and security, why does it cost $37,490 to guard one kid? We don’t get it.
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3. $53,450 – health care.
Hello???? What kind of medical care are we talking about here? It cost $12,856 to keep the average mental patient in a Texas state hospital last year—that’s housing, psychiatric, medical, the whole kit-n’caboodle. (Okay, a lot of people are suing the Texas system, but still.) California is spending over a thousand dollars a week for medical treatment alone? Those better be some damn good drugs they’re dispensing!
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4. $89,420 – educational, vocational and other programs.
Right. To put this little number in perspective it might help to know that Harvard University’s ’08-09 tuition cost is $32,557 per year. (And that’s after Harvard just raised their fees.) If you add in room, board, and all the trimmings, Harvard tops out at $47,215 per year. In other words, California’s lock-up educational program alone is twice what it costs to live, eat and get the best college education money can buy. And at the end of four years, California’s high-ticket jail-bird juveniles have a GED (maybe), while the Harvard students have…well…a degree from Harvard.
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5. $1, 980 – Other.
Yes, of course. In every budget, there’s some line item labeled “other.” It’s the guards’ pizza fund. Whatever. We don’t care.
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After I read the report (and my breathing returned to normal), I called Carole D’Elia the commission’s second-in-command and the primary person on this particular project. Carole is a very nice, obviously bright and extremely knowledgeable woman who confirmed that the figures were indeed correct. “And these aren’t our figures. They came straight out of the governor’s budget.”
ME: So, for instance, what does one of these kids get for nearly $90,000 per year in education spending?
CAROLE: We don’t know. They don’t give us the breakdown.
ME: What about health care…?
CAROLE: A lot of these kids are very high needs juveniles…
ME: Well, but are there, say, teams of therapists working with them?
CAROLE: (wry laughter) We don’t know that either. When we visit facilities and talk to kids they don’t seem to be getting much in the way of medical care…
ME: …Um…. do these numbers seem a little, like…psychotic to you?
CAROLE: (after a pause) Yes.
As to how in the world the state could spend such a preposterous amount of money on each kid and have so little to show for it, Carole too wanted some answers. “We were astounded. And everyone we’ve shown it to so far has been shocked.”
Uh, yeah. So where is all that money really going? Carole agreed that this is a matter meriting some serious additional investigation.
And hopefully some news outlet will embrace the task. But, as of yesterday, while the Daily News and some other California papers dutifully reprinted the AP story on the report, nobody bothered to do the per inmate math or the cost break out I just did for you.
Oh, yeah, and the recently-shredded LA Times has, thus far, printed nothing.
One wonders what those kids might do/become if they were each simply given $250K/year in cash?
Cardenas and Janice Hahn quoted that figure repeatedly in arguing for their property tax for gang intervention programs (which haven’t proven to work — to the contrary — and Chick is still saying, as affected homeowners are, we need to see results of the money spent so far and Carr’s efforts after a year, before hitting property owners again). We really need an audit of why it costs so much to deliver substandard incarceration, and exactly where the money goes (not to the kids themselves, mostly, I’ll wager).
Then of course, critics argue that since a large number of these kids are Latino immigrants, mostly anchor babies and some illegal themselves — of course, many “on the verge of turning their lives around” when social injustice forced them into gangs — the most cost-effective solution would be to send home those here illegally in the first place. (Or, at least to San Francisco.)
We definitely need an audit. Would that Miz Laura could extend her auditing abilities to the state level.
Sorry WBC but if they’re born here they are citizens. There’s that little thing called the 14th Amdt – you may have heard of it! Damn nuisence slavery, what?
C: We definitely need an audit.
Don’t count on an audit telling you the complete story. One time we audited a government funded social services agency. Because we discovered so many questioned costs, missing funds, waste, and luxury retreats, the agency got upset, fired us, and hired a minority firm. Their results looked better in the paper than did ours.
The $250,000 per prison kid per year is typical of government. In Atlanta, the per student costs to not educate kids in public schools are enough to send each one to the finest private local schools. Now, Harvard may be an exception to make a comparison, as it has a giant endowment fund that pays some of its expenses.
Such waste in government is common and should be enough to make most people become conservatives–compassionate ones, of course. Good job, Celeste.
For the record, Harvard’s endowments help it with scholarships.
Stanford’s tuition and room and board are, $36,030 and $11,182 respectively.
Yale is $45,000 for tuition plus room and board.
And the California Youth Authority is $89,430 “tuition” plus $43,180 “room and board”…and $37, 490 for “campus security,” shall we say.
Welcome to the prison industrial complex.
These numbers aren’t excessive. They’re psychotic.
The numbers above are the reason most taxpayers agree with a “Woody” type, we don’t need to spend more money on social programs. For that amount of money each kid’s entire family can live in a nice home and afford to pay for medical insurance. But anybody who has worked on any large government run project knows how money is wasted.
And in the L.A. area I’m sure a very high percentage of these kids are kids of illegal aliens, and as far as the 14th amendment is concerned it’s an “Amendment” which can be “Re-Amended”, to only include slaves. The 14th amendment was not originally intended to protect everybody who sneaks into the country illegally, and many people have come to the U.S., just for the free pre-natal health care, and having an “anchor” baby, as a path to citizenship. Just because it’s not politically correct to say this, does not mean it doesn’t happen on a regular basis.
As fun as it is for me to read Compassionate Conservatives fantasize about amending the constitution to deny children citizenship, I think we may be ignoring the biggest problem: namely the Prison Guard Union. I don’t see them taking too kindly to an audit, and I certainly don’t see any politician standing up to them in the near future
Send these kids for a few months to that crazy sheriff in Arizona who makes inmates live in tents in the desert and wear pink underwear. The kids will change, there isn’t a union, and the cost will be minimal.
There are in fact plans afoot to amend the 14th to include only those here legally — it was intended to cover slaves who had no choice about living here. We’re the only country which grants automatic citizenship to babies born of illegals, who often come here just to have their babies for that reason to “anchor” them and their whole families against deportation, i.e., obeying the law. Like that Arellano woman tried to do (but it backfired), they intentionally use having babies here (at our expense, almost always) to garner lib sympathy against “breaking up the family” and the cruelties of ICE. People are seeing through it and have had enough. Virtualy every one of Celeste’s sob stories falls under this category. Funny, how the parents who are nationals of Mexico or C. America, still demand and receive protection from their own embassies — they want to have it both ways.
You’re well aware that in Europe the kids born to “guest workers” don’t attain citizenship, nor do they anywhere else in the world. (Yeah, this breeds a different set of problems, but you don’t see anyone there seeking to emulate US.) In every Asian country, even the children born to a citizen male and a non- citizen female don’t achieve automatic citizenship — that’s arguably truly xeonophobic, but our system is suicidal AND as #7 says, can be amended BACK TO THE ORIGINAL INTENT.
WBC wanna bet on changing that part of the 14th? John McCain waffled real good at LULAC theother day on that – now he supports the “American Dream” Act (College help for students here in “undocumented” status – and, no, most of them had no say in the matter and have lived here since infancy.
(Reference to st john for Woody’s benefit – waffle houses being so big where he lives!)
Yeah, notice how McCain’s following Obama around to LaRaza and NAACP conferences, and saying whatever the audience wants to hear, moving left of his own position on immigratin to agreeing to no-consequences legalization, “but first securing the borders” in perfect contradictin to himself. Supporting The Dream Act, too. But if he wins, he’ll have to bow to the majority of the public, which doesn’t think giving foreign nationals preference over Americans from NV or AZ makes sense — no one’s preventing illegals from preventing college, contrary to the misldeading hype Cedillo and his backers are putting out there, it’s just a matter of not subsidizing them more than a kid of any race from out of state. He’s just trying to scoop up some of those Hillary votes right now. but he’ll waffle and swing like a pendulum, just like Obama has.
Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles right here in LA, with an original in Hollywood and another on the edge of the hood, are about as Southern as you can get — the first location is “hip” with clubbers and rockers, the other, real down-home. == As for the waffler McCain, he’s probably not conservative enough for Woody’s taste, or his Party’s, and will shift again just before the Convention, I betcha.
I meant, no one’s preventing illegals from attending college (not preventing college)… Their real problem seems to be that many linger ON in college and grad school as long as they can, living off grants etc., since they lack work permits.
A lot of politicians may find it politically inexpedient to follow the money in cases of juvenile justice, but I doubt taxpayers will. Those of us who work for reform see that it’s actually with compassion that we consider the problem from that angle. People with only media-deep experience with juvenile issues should be banned from legislating on the matter.
Nice work,
Chip
Chip Warren
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