Camp Helps Youths Back Into Society

“Los Pinos is not like a prison,” begins the brochure given to teen-agers who are sentenced to the forestry camp. Indeed it’s not.

There are no walls or fences. There’s a school that teaches the three R’s and how to use computers. The inmates spend their evenings in dormitories, not cells.

“We try to stay away from institutional living,” said Carlos Rosas, second-in-command of Los Pinos. “We’re training boys to go back to their communities, not to live in institutions.”

Rejected Adult Prisoners

The Orange County Probation Department has run Los Pinos Forestry Camp in the Cleveland National Forest since 1970, five years after it originally opened as a training center for the federal Job Corps.

Last week the Board of Supervisors rejected suggestions that adult prisoners be transferred to Los Pinos to relieve overcrowding at the Orange County Jail. Instead, in a compromise proposal, the supervisors ordered the Probation Department to study the possibility of putting up to 96 young adults at Los Pinos, which would double the population. The age range of residents, now 16 to 18, would be 16 to 21.

The decision came on the heels of swift and heavy criticism of any tampering with the program designed to educate and train youths to function in society and to turn them away from crime.

“I’m very impressed with the facility,” Betty Lou Lamoreaux, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court, said last week before the supervisors voted. The staff at Los Pinos does “a marvelous job,” she said.

“It’s a beautiful place. The chances of these kids getting prepared for jobs to go out into the community is very, very high.”

Lamoreaux, who prohibited interviews with or photographs of the teen-agers at the camp, said the youths, ages 16 to 18, are at an age when they are “getting their acts together” and realize that Los Pinos might be their last chance to avoid jail.

The forestry camp is one of three “open institutions,” run by the Probation Department, for youths who have gone through the Juvenile Court system. In most cases, juveniles who obey the rules can have the records of their violations of the law sealed.

Looks Like a Campus

The department runs the Joplin Youth Center in Trabuco Canyon, which has 60 beds for boys, who generally are 15 or 16 and have been sentenced to four months to a year in the facility. It also operates the Youth Guidance Center in Santa Ana, which has 100 beds for boys usually sentenced to 30- to 90-day terms.

Los Pinos is in the national forest near the Riverside County border. At 3,000 feet and set amid coulter pines, oaks and liquid amber trees, the camp has the look of a rustic college campus.

The dormitory walls are plastered with pictures of heavy-metal rock bands such as Motley Crue. The inmates and staff wear the same uniforms of olive green trousers and khaki shirts. The detainees compete with other schools in baseball, basketball and track, and they are vocal in declaring their enjoyment of the sports programs.

Because the gymnasium would have been used to house up to 200 adults under one of the proposals to relieve jail overcrowding, the sports program for the juveniles would have suffered, Lamoreaux and other critics complained to supervisors before the vote.

There would have been other changes, too--changes that could have turned the program around, according to Vaughn Roley, 67, the superintendent of Los Pinos since it opened in 1970, and Rex Castellaw, a deputy chief probation officer for the county.

Emphasis on Rehabilitation

The law governing the operation of juvenile institutions “puts lots of emphasis that the program is to be a rehabilitation program,” Castellaw said. With that approach, “you’re going to have a more positive type of program.”

Rather than lock the youths behind bars and keep a close eye on them, the Los Pinos staff shepherds them through academic classroom work and vocational programs in drafting, welding, woodworking, cooking and other subjects.

In addition, the detainees work in the national forest clearing brush, repairing picnic tables and sprucing up the area.

Roley said that adding older youths will not interfere with the program because “we’re not really talking about a prison camp. It’s really . . . a continuation of rehabilitation with older kids.”

Castellaw and Roley said that about 70% of the youths, who spend an average of 120 days at Los Pinos, stay out of trouble with the law for at least a year after being released.

Crimes ‘More Sophisticated’

Those who are sent to Los Pinos, although considered nonviolent, “tend to be more sophisticated in the type of crimes which they commit and may have been committed to an institution previously,” according to a management audit in January of the Probation Department by the County Administrative Office.

“The primary goal is to rehabilitate the minor to understand community responsibilities and to develop employment skills,” the audit notes.

Because there are no walls or fences, escaping is easy, and Roley said escapes average one a month. Two camp residents who were riding in a van fled on Friday, but they waited until the van arrived at Probation Department facilities in Orange before bolting to freedom.

Castellaw said most escapees flee on impulse, sometimes after getting bad news from home, and that they are soon caught. Roley said city boys have been known to wander in the forest for hours, thinking they are getting farther and farther away, only to stumble back into the camp in their confusion.

A larger concern now, according to Roley and Castellaw, is the likelihood that a juvenile sent to Los Pinos is a gang member. Castellaw said the camp staff fights any “erosion” of the traditional agreement among gang members that Los Pinos is “neutral territory.”

When the camp opened 15 years ago, Roley said, gang activity was not a problem. In those days, too, the most common offense of the detainees was car theft; today it is burglary.

Yet Roley, who was a consultant for the California Youth Authority and an expert on detention camps for youth offenders before taking over as superintendent of Los Pinos, said today’s inmates “are not really all that different than they used to be.”