Juvenile Justice LA County Board of Supervisors Probation

Melees at LA County Probation Camps and Juvie Halls: Where is the Change?

As of today, Tuesday, October 19, new LA County Probation Chief Donald Blevins has been on the job exactly six months. So, when I got the report over the weekend that last month a couple of large gang and/or race-related brawls had broken out in the county’s probation camps and juvenile halls, it did not bode well for the hoped for change in the county’s hideously broken juvenile probation system.

I supposed we should be cheered that millions of dollars and scores of employees are no longer being regularly “misplaced.”

And nearly 100 new mental health and health-care professionals will reportedly soon be hired, which is a good thing.

But in the camps and the juvenile halls that are the heart of the matter, (since that’s where the system meets the kids it serves)— progress is depressingly hard to locate.


CAN ONE GUY REALLY DO IT ALL?

Last summer, many felt that federal help (in the form of a consent decree) was necessary in order to clean up and transform LA County’s spectacularly broken juvenile probation system. However, Chief Blevins wanted a chance to fix the horrible mess on his own—a desire that was understandable.

However, six months in, there are unsettling indications that the dysfunctional and damaging environment that exists in the county’s worst juvenile facilities, remains largely unaltered.

One cannot help but wonder if, despite the best of intentions, this swamp of an agency isn’t too much for any one guy (and his team) to reboot—top to bottom– without the tools that a federal consent decree provides.

The report of the brawls is one more disquieting sign of the magnitude of the problem:


PLUS CA CHANGE, PLUS C’EST LA MÊME CHOSE?

As every expert will tell you, when kids are sentenced to juvenile probation camps or juvenile halls, our best chance to keep those kids from coming back to juvenile lock up, is to have smart programs that emphasize rehabilitation, not punishment. The idea is for a kid to emerge better from these county-enforced time-outs. Away from the pressures of street violence, gang influence and whatever family dysfunction there may be, camp should be a safe place where firm boundaries, a disciplined atmosphere, daily eduction, productive activities, and mentoring allows a kid who is going in the wrong direction, to correct his or her flight path, and maybe do a little growing up.

The state of Missouri has famously pioneered a model that accomplishes this goal brilliantly.

Unfortunately, according to anecdotal evidence and statistics both, most of LA County’s juvenile facilities are still stuck in the punishment-and-violence end of the juvenile corrections continuum.

This is from the aforementioned report issued from the office of Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas:

On Sunday September 5, 2010, a fight broke out between approximately 30 minors at Camp Francis Scobee, one of the camps in the Challenger Memorial Youth Center, located in Lancaster. {My note: The Challenger group is the cluster of camps that is the focus of a humongous lawsuit brought by the ACLU for some of its “Dickensian” conditions.] The melee had racial overtones and included fights between African American and Latino minors. The fighting resulted in injuries to both minors and staff members.

The following week, on Tuesday September 14, 2010, there was another fight, this time at the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in the San Fernando Valley. According to the Probation Department, there were 16 minors involved in fighting between African Americans and Latinos. Fortunately, there were no injuries.

The report goes on to say that there have been 15 such group clashes between out-of-control fist-swinging kids at the probation camps thus far in 2010, six of them Camp Scobee alone. Most of the clashes had racial overtones, most appeared to be gang-related.

In addition there were 15 other “major disturbances” at the county’s juvenile Halls—11 of those melees at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall. (More commonly called “Sylmar” because of its location, Barry J. Nidorf has long been known to be the most out of control of the county’s juvenile halls.)

In nearly all instances, the fights have resulted in injuries to both kids and staff.

Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of brawls.

Sylmar alone has had more than one brawl a month. And those are the big, multi-kid fights where injuries resulted. In other words, these are the fights that we know about.

Stories of staff unable or unwilling to control gang and race-related fighting in the camps and halls have been reported for years by the teenage probationers and adult volunteers who spent time in the facilities. I posted a fragment of one such story in February of this year, two months before Chief Blevins took over.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Eastlake [Juvenile Hall] is pretty strict,” [17-year-old David] said. But Sylmar was a whole different matter, he said. “At Sylmar there’s a lot of crooked stuff going on.”

I asked him to explain. “Oh, for one thing, certain staff will open doors to cells so that guys can come inside the cell and beat up some other guy, while the staff walks down the hall to make a phone call.” He said, the staff member came back to stop things “before it got too bloody.”

I asked if these were just rumors, or did he know first hand. He knew first hand, David said, because on three different occasions, he had been on either the giving or the receiving end of such staff-sanctioned beating.

The other thing was, he said, “some of the staff brings in drugs, if you have the money to pay for ‘em.”

What kind of drugs? I wanted to know.

“Weed,” he said. “And coke. And cigarettes and lighters.

“But you got to have the money,” David said. “If you have the money, you can get most anything.”

So, have things changed under the new regime? September’s stats suggest not—or at least not much.

Once Chief Blevins had the chance to get his feet under him we had hoped for….well…. progress. Yes, he’s turning a supertanker, but if we don’t see a few ripples on the water, we will start to assume that the thing ain’t turning.

“This is just not good,” Supervisor Ridley-Thomas told me on the phone Monday night. “These incidents let us know that [probation} is still not managing the environment well at all. We’re not seeing improvement. We’re not yet seeing an attempt to manage it.”


SO WHAT TO DO?

Ridley-Thomas has written a motion asking for a report on these and other sorts of violent activities, to be delivered in 30 days. (The motion will be introduced at the Sups meeting on Tuesday morning.)

That’s a start.

It’s essential that the supervisors, and outside advocates, and the press keep the pressure on so that the urgency of the matter is always out front and visible.

(Urgency and real-no-kidding accountability are precisely the elements not present in the past with probation. The chronic lack thereof is what got us into this mess.)


HERE’S THE DEAL: On January 19, 2011, Donald BlevIns will have been on the job for nine months to the day. If we’ve not seen measurable progress by then we will understand that more aggressive help is needed, and there will be another call for federal intervention.

And this time the call will be much, much louder.

25 Comments

  • So because we have all these fights between races that don’t get along pretty much anywhere anymore, that’s what you use as your most recent indictment of this system? Your informant is a kid involved in beating other inmates and he’s of course trustworthy?

    Why does Ridley even need a report, what a waste of time. Blacks and Hispanics that are gang members, and even many that aren’t can’t get along Celeste. That’s just how it is.

  • You’ve got a great blog with timely and on-point content, but I’ve got to ask: whats the deal with the hideously difficult to read formatting? Crazy lines breaking up the post, bold text all over the place, and subtitle throughout? There’s a reason that newspapers and other journalist blogs (such as the New York Times) don’t use these. They make it difficult for the reader to read. Frankly, the main reason I don’t regularly click through my RSS to read your posts is because its too damn annoying. Just my two cents.

  • Gordo, I appreciate the feedback. For a long time, I’ve gotten the precise opposite feedback from folks. But I’m going to be doing some redesign in the next couple of months, and I’ll take what you said into consideration.

    SureFire, the kid’s story is simply an anecdotal example of the kind of thing that had been repeatedly reported by adult volunteers.

    Sylmar and a bunch of the camps are simply out of control—as they have been for a very long time. And there’s no excuse for it. The same thing doesn’t occur at camps Gonzales or Kilpatrick, which have the same populations, the same gang pressures, but strong directors and lots of smart programing. Kids love it at those places, which often restart lives.

    Eastlake Juvenile Hall has some problems, but nothing compared to Sylmar, which is the nightmare. That’s management, nothing else. And the fact that these same places still have 30 kid brawls has to do with management and oversight, period. That so little has changed six months in, is not encouraging.

  • Police and sheriffs instigate gang violence, too, especially special units assigned to gangs. Job security.

  • Police will ask gang members “You guys warring with Messicans?” “You guys warring with mayates?”, etc. It’s almost as if they’re telling them who they should be fighting. Gang members make the personal choice to gang bang, but the system draws the battle lines. You’d better believe it.

  • Whatever you do Rob son’t ever demand accountabilty from the assholes who make many areas of the city to dangerous for kids to play outside or old people able to walk to the store.

    Keep kissing their asses so they can see you’re writing nice things about them so they’ll leave you alone.

  • If Old cholos didn’t have kids in Juvenille Hall which are used by the loser father to sell drugs, initiate new gang members and start race riots the problem could be controlled.

    Mandatory sterilazation of fools who should not be having kids is just about the only real solution to stop more juvenille delinquents.

  • But what kind of progress should we be looking for? Maybe we could start diverting some kids from the two facilities you mentioned to others until we can fire all the staff and hire new people to replace them?

  • Rob, any way you can splice all of your consecutive comments into one nicely written paragraph?

  • Sure Fire, whatever you do don’t ever demand accountability from the cops who you know instigate gang violence. Did you watch that MSNBC lockup San Quentin? Their new warden (at the time it aired) said his biggest challenge was not only taking power away from gangs, but to get the guards to stop being so fascinated with them and playing into their politics. Jesus flippin Christ. That wasn’t Mike Davis or Monster Kody who said that, it was a warden! And do you think it ends there? That’s just scratching the surface. You are either defending the corruption or you really don’t have the expertise to know it exists, Sure Fire. In other words, maybe you were never more than a meter maid. There is more than enough empirical data out there to prove that the gang culture as we know it in America rose to power with the prison industry as we know it. Indisputable.

  • WTF Says:
    October 19th, 2010 at 2:50 pm

    Mandatory sterilazation of fools who should not be having kids is just about the only real solution to stop more juvenille delinquents.

    ………..

    How about mandatory sterilization of fools who can’t spell “sterilization” and “juvenile”, for starters? If we’re going to play the Darwin game you should at least know where he stood on grown adults with poor grammar having children of their own.

  • Sure Fire,
    Everybody knows that the cops and prison guards are the problem. Everybody knows that people in the inner city put bars on their doors and windows to keep the cops out of their houses. We all know that in gang “infested” areas the reason parents don’t let their young children play outside is because they might catch a stray bullet from cowboy cops doing a drive by. It happens all the time. There is empirical data to prove it. Everybody knows that you can go into any gang “infested” area and walk up to a cop and buy whatever you need.
    Jesus flippin Christ man, don’t you know that the EME started because they wanted to put a stop to prison guards beating on them? You probably believe they victimized other Mexicans from the norte and in your mind you probably fantasize about a gang of Mexicans from the north organizing to defend themselves from the EME.
    There’s plenty of empirical data to prove you are delusional Sure Fire.
    The cops and the prison guards are the real problems in our society. Everybody knows that.

  • It’s the prison industrial complex maaaannnnn. Wake up Syre Fire. Without prisons there would be no gangs. It’s so simple some people just can’t, or won’t grasp it. Prisons are the reasons for crime. Prisons are the reason for gangs. You have the warden at San Quentin saying that the problem is the guards being fascinated with gangs.
    Everybody knows that it takes an absolute IDIOT to be fascinated by gangs. I’ll bet the majority of prison guards troll every blog they can that’s about gangs and try to learn every thing they can about gangs. They’re fascinated by them. That right there makes them an idiot.

    Jesus flippin Christ Sure Fire, wake up maaaaannnn. Think about it. What kind of idiot is fascinated by gangs?

  • Script, I hate bad cops have worked I.A. and they are a disgrace to the badge. I don’t know any cops that feel differently but many, like me, demand the truth in any given case, not simply the words of someone with a track history of the type you seem ok with.

    The Police Officers Bill of Rights came into existence because people like you wanted cops to have less rights than the average asshole. Like it or not investigations determine the facts of a case, not what one person screams. Your use of the term “pigs” and blatant indictment of cops almost on adaily basis is an insult to people like me. Get it?

    As for your “meter maid” line, whose the one that’s fucking dillusional here? You think some meter maid writes like I do?It was a “meter maid” that put that genuis Reg into hiding?

    You shoot off your mouth and that’s it, you get your info from tv and the internet…you’re a typical product of your times.

    I know ATQ, silly me.

  • Cops are supposed to have less rights than the average asshole! Read the constitution (perhaps for the first time)! You have the complete wrong idea about what this country stands for, Sure Fire.

  • Here’s another reason not to vote for the liar Kamala Harris, this is the kind of crime where she’d say the death penalty doesn’t apply.

    http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/twisted_taunts_of_wicked_killer_X0bYYGUJnR9GYZnSfoP1OI

    I guess Rob is talking about the constitution of Boyle Heights.

    Reg runs off and shows he’s made of nerf, Rob is pretty much insane and SBL is fixated on “pasty white guys”.

    This is the best the left has to offer?

  • Someone get to Oakland and make a missing report on Reg. It’s been a week since he ran off.

    What a guy.

  • Kamala Harris just knows the death penalty is wrong, Sure Fire.

    And, I think you’ve made clear what constitution you’re talking about: The bill of rights for cops? LOL. They already have a bill of rights, written by this nation’s founding fathers. They basically have the right to do what the people tell them to do, as they are public servants, nothing more.

  • No need to try anything. I’m already aware that most cops today have been convinced they’re above the citizens which they serve. It’s also one of the things threatening the freedom and democracy of this nation. Police are becoming thugs, and it’s alarming.

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