I’ll be on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA? tonight (Monday) at 7 p.m. together with LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.
You can listen live on KCRW, 89.9 FM.
And here is the podcast link.
We will be talking about the mind-numbing disaster that is LA County Juvenile probation and what to do about it.
We hold our public schools at least marginally responsible for improvements. But after 10 years of a threatened federal lawsuit, and ghastly charges of mismanagement and civil rights violations, we have required no demonstration of improvement by the largest probation agency in the nation, which oversees 2200 kids in conditions that have repeatedly been described as abusive.
Sadly, I don’t think we’re close to the end of the awful revelations.
In addition to the conversation that you’ll hear on the broadcast, I had a post show talk with the show’s host, Warren Olney, that I suspect did not leave either of us encouraged.
After one tapes a show with Warren he always calls to say thanks. (In addition to being the smartest and most consummate of pros, Warren is also an old fashioned gentleman.)
When he called this time he said that, after all his years as a reporter he didn’t think there was much that could surprise him. “But what’s going on at probation,” he said. “That has succeeded in surprising even me.”
We both wondered aloud what it would take to substantively improve things in the county’s juvenile halls and probation camps.
After another ten minutes of talking, neither one of us was confident we had touched on a viable answer.