June 22, 2011 | 12:42 PM | By

Trouble in LA’s juvenile halls

FILED UNDER: Corrections, Juvenile Justice, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Probation

Two new reports out this week bring troubling news from Los Angeles County’s beleaguered juvenile halls. According to the Crime Report, Los Angeles is not taking court-ordered reforms serious enough to accomplish them by a Fall 2011 deadline. The county has been under federal and state supervision since 2008, when regulators discovered abusive and unprofessional conditions in the juvenile halls. Since then, we’ve seen regular reports of misconduct emerge from LA:

For instance, on pp: 7-9 of the monitors’ report, one finds a section titled, “Abusive Institutional Practices,” that outlines “abusive and/or threatening behaviors” toward kids that staff are ordered to avoid. The behaviors include:

….“slamming” youth into hard surfaces such as walls, floors, doors or any other hard surface/object; or placing youth into uncomfortable positions for long periods of time that may be viewed by a reasonable person as inappropriate….denial or limiting of restroom access….taking punishing or restricting the programming opportunities, including limiting outdoor recreation, for large groups of youth when one or two youth act out…”

While the report indicates such incidents were occurring with somewhat less frequency than in the past, they are still occurring.

There are also complaints that staff don’t check on suicidal kids in solitary confinement, merely filling out forms that say they completed checks.

As for LA’s new leadership, Probation Chief Donald Blevins, who left Alameda County for Los Angeles, the Crime Report says he “hasn’t cleaned house, taken names, and done whatever it requires to fix the camps that are still failing so many of LA County’s kids.”

The reports also give more fodder to those who oppose the scaling back of the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice, the youth prison system. Under Governor Jerry Brown’s prison realignment plan, many kids in the state system would be returned to county juvenile halls–the majority to Los Angeles County.