The Informant

• Who should handle California's most troubled kidsby Rina PaltaDownload

Shawn Thorpe

California grapples with dual missions: to punish and rehabilitate young offenders.

Earlier this month, Governor Jerry Brown proposed some dramatic changes to close the state’s $28 billion budget gap. One was shutting down the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), California’s youth correctional system. The DJJ has been the subject of lawsuits and public outcry for years. So some prison reformers are celebrating the potential closure. Others doubt the plan will work. But everyone agrees it’s time we reexamine a fundamental societal question – when kids get in trouble, even when they commit horrible crimes, what should we do with them?

This piece ran on our nightly news program, Crosscurrents, last night. Audio above and transcript after the jump.

Some of the names in this story have been changed, to protect the privacy of children whose criminal records have been sealed.

RINA PALTA: It’s a sunny weekend in the Bay Area and Freddy is watching three of his little brothers turn the front driveway into a skateboard ramp.

FREDDY: A lot of my younger brothers are skaters, which I’m happy that they’re skaters, not gangsters. I’d rather them be skaters and dedicate their time to that than to be running the streets like I was when I was a kid.

Today, Freddy is 24, but, when he was younger – about the age of his preteen brothers – he spent time at juvenile hall and on probation. The first time was for assaulting someone during a fight.

FREDDY: And the second time I got incarcerated for trying to sling, which is sell drugs in school. I did a week for that and got out. And the third time I got incarcerated … which was the day after Thanksgiving 2000. It was that day. It was on a Friday, actually. I don’t know what time. But that was a crazy day.

That day, Freddy shot a rival gang member. His charge on attempted murder sent him not back to the county juvenile hall, but to the California Youth Authority, the state’s juvenile corrections system now known as the Division of Juvenile Justice. In Freddy’s case, because of his gang history and behavior inside, he spent a lot of time in lockup, which means maximum security.

FREDDY: I caught up over a year just being in lockup for fighting, jumping gates to get to other people to fight them. The last three or four years of my life in jail I was just in and out of lockup, coming out of my room for three hours at the most.

Freddy spent 10 years inside the Division of Juvenile Justice, or DJJ – sometimes in facilities as close by as Stockton, others as far away as the outskirts of LA. Which means it was hard for Freddy’s family to visit. Freddy has 10 brothers and at one time, when he was serving time in Chino, Freddy says almost his whole family came to visit.

FREDDY: I got to see six of my younger brothers that I hadn’t seen in maybe four years. It was a really emotional experience for me because I met my youngest brother. I never knew him, you know. I walked into the building and I see my mother and all of my little brothers. I was speechless. I didn’t know what to say. I just went around shaking their hands, you know?

Instead of learning things like how to drive, how to use a computer and how to navigate the social world of high school, Freddy spent his teens learning to live by the rules of the juvenile prison system.

FREDDY: Three minute showers in Chino. Ten minutes to five minutes in Ventura. Five minutes in OH Close.

After 10 years in the DJJ, Freddy got out about two weeks ago.

FREDDY: I won’t say that I’m handicapped, but it has, in a way, kept me back.

On one hand, Freddy will have a clean record when he gets off parole on his 25th birthday. He was put in the system as a juvenile. Whatever he did as a kid would not follow him into adulthood – at least not on paper. But, is he ready to succeed as an adult?

BARRY KRISBERG: The whole spirit of it is second chance.

Barry Krisberg is the research and policy director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute at Berkeley’s Law School.

KRISBERG: Several of the young people who’re in the system right now have committed very serious crimes at very young ages. But they’re different people now. They’ve grown, they’ve matured, they’ve developed a different set of values.

That’s the idea, anyway. But, to many kids inside, the youth facilities, for many years, felt like prisons. In the 1990s, the juvenile system hit its peak of 10,000 wards and the facilities became crowded. They were gang-infested, and kids who misbehaved would spend months inside of lockups.

KRISBERG: The conditions were horrid – some of the worst that anyone had ever documented in juvenile justice.

And that second chance wasn’t turning into anything. The latest available data, which is from 2005, shows that about 81% of wards released from DJJ were arrested within three years of release. About 56% either returned to DJJ or entered an adult prison within three years. Those kinds of numbers led to a lawsuit against the DJJ in 2003 by the Prison Law Office. Governor Schwarzenegger chose not to fight it and agreed to make changes.

DAN MACALLAIR: The state promised that it would fix the system.

Dan Macallair is the director of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

MACALLAIR: That it would abandon these old prison-like facilities, get rid of the violence, get rid of the gang subculture, place kids in situations where they truly could be rehabilitated, where they could be housed in safe facilities.

Some things have changed, Macallair says. The current population in the system has decreased about 90% to 1,200 wards. Several facilities have been closed. And fewer kids end up in lockups. As for promises that the system would fundamentally change and start focusing on rehabilitation…

MACALLAIR: The state promised that back in 2004, and since that time they have failed in that effort.

Which is why Macallair supports Governor Jerry Brown’s new proposal to completely shut down the DJJ. Citing the $28 billion budget gap, Brown has proposed to completely dismantle the state system, which currently spends about $234,000 per child each year. The savings, according to Brown, would total $250 million and put the responsibility of care and reform of these offenders back on the county. Is this a good idea? Turns out, intelligent minds disagree.

MACALLAIR: And I think that’s the direction we need to go.

KRISBERG: It seems to me that it’s a step backwards.

Dan Macallair and Barry Krisberg, both juvenile justice reformers, have different takes on the matter. At the heart of each of their opinions is a debate over who would best prepare these kids for adulthood – the county or the state.

We don’t yet have any details of Governor Brown’s plan, like how much money he plans on giving the counties to absorb more kids, or where the most troubled kids will be housed. But to some people, like Krisberg, the idea of tearing up the DJJ sounds crazy. Why would you tear up a system that’s been the subject of reform for years? A system that no matter what, lets kids get out at the latest when they’re 25? Why transfer responsibility to a set of uncoordinated counties that don’t have regulations, uniformity or any guarantee that they’ll even treat the kids better than the state?

Krisberg says some county facilities are known for being worse than the states’.

KRISBERG: So we’re taking them out of not very great facilities, kind of passable programming, and we’re putting them into hell.

Krisberg also fears that if there’s no juvenile prison system, prosecutors will feel compelled to try more kids as adults. And for those who commit serious crimes, he fears counties won’t be willing to keep and rehabilitate them.

KRISBERG: The board of supervisors generally are not interested in spending money on these youth. And I think they’re going to be less interested in spending money on youth convicted of homicide, rape, gun crimes.

There are all kinds of things in Brown’s budget proposal that are going to put pressure on the counties, especially in the criminal justice arena. There’s a proposal to put low-level offenders in county jail, and to move parole supervision of many offenders to county probation departments. Who’s going to pay for all of this and what will prevent the state from simply walking away and leaving the counties to pick up the pieces?

MACALLAIR: That’s really an important question.

Dan Macallair, of the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, says the next few months are going to be important to figuring out the answer.

MACALLAIR: The state will have to maintain its promise, of course. But I think it’ll be easier to maintain their promise without the dual responsibility of: one, trying to maintain a very expensive but failed state system, and at the same time trying to prop up the county systems. If the resources come to county, the counties will become more creative. When the counties have to face the necessity of developing services for a broader range of kids, they’ll do it. And you know what, I think they’ll do it well. They’ll step up to the challenge.

As the state is considering leaving behind an old system, Freddy is trying to leave behind his record and start fresh.

FREDDY: Here I am now and since I’ve been out, I’ve been doing everything I have to do to maintain myself out of trouble.

After 10 years of being detained, his goals are to get a job, get into school, get his own place to live, and importantly, get his drivers license.

FREDDY: Man, yesterday I went to Half Moon Bay for the first time in almost 12 years. I used to go there when I was young. My mother and my dad used to take us a lot, actually. It was nice, you know. I caught myself taking pictures of the sky and the ocean – things you don’t value when you’re a youth because you don’t know how to.

Most importantly, Freddy says he values patience – something he learned in the correctional system. And something he’ll need as he tries to navigate this new life and leave the old one behind.