Children in Tiny Boxes

The Los Angeles County Grand Jury, which serves as a watchdog over public jails, joined a chorus of critics Friday in proclaiming what anyone with a scrap of humanity knows: Confining juveniles to 4-by-8-foot cells for 23 1/2 hours a day is cruel. It is also, the grand jury noted, usual for minors kept in the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

The daily lockdowns are ostensibly for protection, not punishment. Federal law requires that juveniles housed in adult jails be kept out of view and hearing of older and potentially predatory inmates. So, as many as 44 teenagers eat, sleep and do schoolwork in windowless cells, with three hours on Fridays to exercise in a cage on the jail roof. In late May, two of them attempted suicide.

No wonder the grand jury concluded that minors don’t belong in adult jails. In doing so it joined the New York-based Human Rights Watch, the San Francisco Youth Law Center and local ministers in calling for the county to end the practice. It’s hard to find anyone who supports it, right down to Sheriff Lee Baca, who runs the jails, and the Probation Department, which oversees juvenile halls and camps. The challenge is finding someone to actually do something.

Of the 2,000 youths held in the county’s juvenile halls, roughly 150 are under judges’ orders to be tried as adults, accused of murders, carjackings, burglaries and other crimes deemed too serious for Juvenile Court. State law allows them to be held in adult jail if their conduct threatens public safety or the safety of other juveniles.

Human rights advocates claim that California’s standards for determining who is a threat are vague and are arbitrarily applied by prosecutors and judges. But the larger question remains what to do with those juveniles who are found to be potentially dangerous under revised standards.

Despite last year’s much-publicized rash of escapes from juvenile halls, the answer is not adult jail but better security at the juvenile facilities. And six months ago, the county seemed to be making progress. It found $1.8 million to “harden” a building at the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar. The sheriff suggested using armed deputies instead of unarmed probation officers to guard it. The renovation should be finished by the end of August. But now the Sheriff’s Department says it can’t spare any deputies; the Probation Department says it can’t provide high security.

This is not about securing a whole new jail, just 44 beds. If the L.A. County Board of Supervisors doesn’t insist on a solution, the courts will. And the county can’t claim it didn’t know about the problem.