Auditors Rebuke Youth Authority

In a sweeping condemnation of the juvenile corrections system, auditors concluded Monday that the California Youth Authority is failing to give offenders the education and training that could save them from a life of crime.

The state’s youth prisons are still confining too many wards for 23 hours a day, the audit found, calling the practice “ineffective and dehumanizing.”

The Office of the Inspector General even found that 27 youths at a Chino detention facility were locked up around the clock, except for five-minute daily showers. And 39 youths at a Stockton facility were locked down for more than 30 days, with three kept in their cells for more than 200 days.

Numerous other wards, the audit found, were receiving little in the way of required teaching and counseling designed to help prepare them for their eventual release.

Auditors found that the CYA had failed to adequately address 43% of the problems identified in previous audits since 2000. “Most troubling,” said Inspector General Matthew L. Cate, “is that many of the deficiencies that have not been corrected are central to the Youth Authority’s core mission of rehabilitating the young people entrusted to its care.”

While noting that the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger inherited almost all of the problems, Cate called on officials to take immediate action to halt the downward spiral of a system responsible for 3,588 youthful offenders.

CYA Director Walter Allen III, who was appointed last year, said in a teleconference that the report “validates what we have known for more than a year.... That CYA is an outdated system in crisis that needs a major overhaul.”

Allen said that he already has made wholesale changes in the beleaguered agency’s top management and promised to use the audit as a tool for further improvements. “There is no way of taking 25 to 30 years of problems and changing them in six months or a year,” he said.

The CYA has been repeatedly criticized for its violence, poor healthcare and failure to reduce a repeat offender rate of 70%.

In November, Schwarzenegger announced an overhaul as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit brought by the nonprofit Prison Law Office in San Rafael.

The settlement requires the state to develop plans to improve many CYA operations, including its management of gangs, treatment of the mentally ill and use of force by staff.

But Prison Law Office staff attorney Sara Norman said the audit shows that even with a new administration -- and a will to make things better -- “they can’t make it work. You still have this system of big, crumbling juvenile prisons, and you can’t provide treatment and rehabilitation under those circumstances.”

Allen said he is exploring a pilot program modeled after youth corrections in Missouri, where offenders wear street clothes and live in home-like settings more conducive to rehabilitation.

The audit highlighted failures in the education system for offenders sent to CYA by juvenile court judges. Inmates are supposed to receive four hours of education a day. But at the Southern Youth Correctional Center and Clinic, they received an average of 1 1/2 hours of instruction per day. And nearly a third of the classes are canceled each day at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, the audit found, usually because the teacher is absent.

A shortage of teachers, the report found, contributed to wards being confined for 23 hours a day.

Although Allen announced during his confirmation hearing in August that the practice was ending, auditors found in visits to five facilities that 243 -- or 9% -- were locked up for all but an hour a day. More than 100 wards were kept confined because there were not enough teachers to provide them with educational services.

Allen said the CYA has made some progress: Wards who pose special management problems are confined no more than 21 hours a day.

The CYA director said he has made it clear that he wants to stop the practice of confining wards for 23 hours a day, which he attributed to poor management. And he said he hopes that better recruitment of teachers -- and better salaries -- will eliminate the 45 vacancies in the 381 teaching positions.

The audit found unsafe conditions at some facilities, including one living unit of the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino, where cell windows were blocked, preventing anyone from monitoring the activity inside. In one cell, a twisted bedsheet was draped over a ceiling light.

At the N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton auditors found that pairs of offenders were placed in 10-foot-by-16-foot fenced exercise yards with no recreation equipment or toilet facilities and only a small amount of water.

The audit praised the CYA for eliminating vacancies in youth correctional counselor positions, and said that suicide preparedness was much improved.

But in a sampling of 14 general population offenders, auditors found that none had received the minimum amount of weekly individual and small-group counseling sessions.

“This audit reaffirms that this system is broken, incapable of repairing itself,” said Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) in a statement. “Despite good intentions and a whole lot of promises, this ship continues to sink.”

Romero, who has conducted hearings on excessive force, use of cages and other problems in the CYA, pledged to work with the governor’s office to address the problems outlined by the inspector general.

Sue Burrell, staff attorney at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, said: “I think the present administration has been entitled to a learning curve, but I think we have reached the point where we need to see changes.”