THE CASE OF THE HOARDED JUVENILE JUSTICE $$—AGAIN
Last Tuesday, the LA County Board of Supervisors passed a motion authored by Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Sheila Kuehl, telling LA County Probation to stop dragging its feet and fork over the $5 million in juvenile justice money that has been approved since last summer, but still somehow hasn’t gotten to the designated youth programs in each supervisor’s district, each of which desperately need the funds in order to help justice involved kids heal past traumas and reboot their lives in healthy directions.
Interim Probation Chief Cal Remington is to report back to the board in 30 days that the deed has been done, contracts have been signed, and the money has been delivered.
Why this has taken so long is unclear—or that than to say that wei
Last July, if you’ll remember, WitnessLA reported that LA County Probation was sitting on $21.7 million in state-allocated juvenile justice funds that were supposed to be spent toward programs and services that were aimed at keeping kids out of the county’s juvenile justice system—or from returning to the system, if they’d already been in.
When the Supes learned of the nearly $22 in hoarded cash that was supposed to be helping LA County’s youth, they voted last July 14 to instruct the Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Probation Officer to work out a spending plan that would trigger “the immediate allocation of $1.0 million” per Supervisorial District “to fund critical programs and services delivered by community-based organizations”—for a total of $5 million to be used for needed youth programs countywide.
On November 2, 2015, the county CEO reported to the board that all the necessary local and state groups had signed off on the $5 million, and on the “critical programs and services” and the community-based organizations slated to provide those services within each district.
And then….nothing.
Last month, Jeremy Loudenback reported in WitnessLA about Centinela Youth Services (CYS) and its unique juvenile diversion program, which is one of the programs slated to receive some of the log-jammed money.
Supervisor Ridley-Thomas, whose district includes most of South L.A., pledged his $1 million to support the CYS’s programs in South Los Angeles. Supervisor Kuehl has committed half of her allotment—$500,0000—to CYS in order to expand the juvenile diversion programs in the San Fernando Valley.
Kuehl also designated some of her $$ to a program called the Girls Health Screen (GHS), “the first evidence-based and gender-responsive medical screen developed exclusively for girls 11-17 years old who enter detention and other juvenile justice residential programs. The Girls Health Screen, which was developed by the Girls Health and Justice Institute, is now part of the standard medical intake for all girls entering the Los Angeles county juvenile justice system. (WLA will have more on the GHS and its importance later this month.)
WHERE THE 22 MILLION $$ CAME FROM IN THE FIRST PLACE
The source of probation’s nearly $22 million in unspent juvenile justice funds comes from a funding stream created by the Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act (JJCPA), which was itself created by the Crime Prevention Act of 2000 in order “to provide a stable funding source for local juvenile justice programs aimed at curbing crime and delinquency among at-risk youth.”
The funds, which are allocated on a per capita basis to the state’s 56 participating counties (Alpine and Sierra counties opt out), are mandated to be spent to fund a range of programs that help kids. The methods used are required to be evidence-based—aka programs “that have been demonstrated to be effective…”
Each year the various counties have to propose how they are going to spend the money received—which for LA has been in the neighborhood of $28 million annually. Then at years end, they are expected to document how the funds were, in fact, spent.
Only .5—or less than one percent—of the money is allowed to be used for administrative costs. The rest is supposed to go straight to programs that directly benefit each county’s at risk youth. There is no mention in the regulations about any of the dollars being encouraged to lie fallow in a savings account that, until recently, few people seemed to know existed.
Last summer, when WLA asked Supervisor Ridley-Thomas why so much money that was slated to be used for the benefit of LA County’s at-risk kids had not beeen put to work.
“I don’t think they have a good reason,” he said. “So, it’s our job to do something about it.”
“The anti recidivism work that we need to do is really very substantial,” Ridley-Thomas continued, “so it becomes a bit problematic to imagine that we are not using all the resources at our disposal to work on the problem. The need is great. And it’s our job to address the need.”
Hopefully, this time the board’s action will succeed in dislodging at least $5 million of the withheld funds to do so.
I urge the supervisors follow up.