Child Courts Struggle in Harsh Environment

In one courtroom of the Criminal Courts Building, the bailiff dispenses Tootsie Rolls, much like a doctor handing out lollipops to his young patients. A sweet to reward good behavior. A bit of candy to assuage the pain.

It’s a rare touch in Dependency Court, where neglected, abused or abandoned children may spend hours in crowded hallways, sometimes sharing benches with defendants in nearby criminal hearings.

Each year, thousand of families, most of them poor, will find themselves summoned to the Criminal Courts Building to begin a civil process that will determine whether minors placed under judicial protection should be returned to their parents.

All 15 of the county’s dependency courts are crowded into the building that handles criminal cases--a situation that Robert L. Chaffee, director of the county Department of Children’s Services, recently described as “scandalous.”

Few judicial functions are as significant as Dependency Court, people who work in the system argue convincingly. After all, asked Assistant County Counsel Larry Cory, who supervises attorneys representing the Child Services Department, “What is more important than the life of a child?”

In the cases that reach Dependency Court--cases in which a parent has failed or a home has broken down--the circumstances are often heart-rending.

A woman in the front row of the courtroom rests her arm on a bassinet containing her grandchild. Her own child, the baby’s mother, is being told she must kick her drug habit. Otherwise she may lose parental rights forever.

The young mother, barely past childhood herself, bursts into tears. “It’s your fault,” the grandmother snarls.

The same morning, the court will hear from a 5-year-old girl who has contracted genital herpes, allegedly from her mother’s boyfriend, and has been living with foster parents. The mother promises to stop seeing the boyfriend, and the child, smiling in her purple party dress, clearly wants to go home.

Commissioner H. George Taylor, who is presiding over this hearing, grants the child’s wish. Her attorney protests. The mother is not to be trusted, the lawyer says. She does not understand what has happened.

While the sad, sometimes tragic, stories unfold one by one upstairs, newcomers to the dependency system crowd into another courtroom.

Many look frightened or bewildered. Their children have been taken away from them, placed temporarily at MacLaren Children’s Center or a foster home.

“I know it must have come as a shock to you when you came in here and saw that the building was named Criminal Courts,” says Judge Pro Tem Joan H. Carney, an 18-year veteran of the system whose tiny chambers are adorned with a teddy bear.

Since the proceedings are confidential, only one family can be in a courtroom at a time. Often it is standing-room-only in the corridors as people pace nervously, ignoring the no-smoking signs. Others balance infants on their laps. Babies’ cries may be heard from inside the courtroom.

On one floor, rows of chairs filled with waiting families are crammed in the space between the elevator banks. Intimate family matters must be discussed in stairwells.

The children involved in dependency hearings “have not committed any crimes, yet they are treated the same way as the criminal justice system is set up to treat adults,” said Christina Crawford, co-chair of the Children’s Services Commission’s Committee on Dependency Courts. Crawford is the daughter of actress Joan Crawford and author of “Mommie Dearest.”

Ever since Dependency Court was moved into the Criminal Courts Building on a temporary basis in 1978, court and county officials have agreed that a building intended for criminal proceedings is an inappropriate setting for deciding such a sensitive question as whether a child should be separated from his or her parents.

But efforts to find a new home for the court and its support services have been stymied by a lack of money and disagreements over the best solution to the problem.

The proliferation of new dependency cases--from 2,496 in fiscal 1972 to 16,118 in fiscal year 1986--has lent added urgency to the issue. One reason for this dramatic upswing is a 1981 law that requires child-care custodians to report suspected abuse or face criminal prosecution.

“Some of the increase in caseload can be attributed to the focus on child abuse and the interest in the McMartin case,” said Kathryn Doi Todd, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court, noting that so far this year, the number of new cases has jumped 23% over the same period last year.

Another law, passed in 1982, has also added to the court’s burden by requiring dependency cases to be reviewed every six months until the problem in the home has been corrected, the child has reached 18, a guardian has been appointed or the child is placed for adoption.

Right now between 25,000 and 30,000 children are being supervised by the court.

Officials of the Superior Court, which has jurisdiction over Dependency Court, say that while they expect a need for 40 courtrooms by the end of the century, they are willing to settle for 25.

Another impetus for moving Dependency Court has come from expanding criminal caseloads and the Superior Court’s stated objections to the year-old experiment in holding trials at night. There would be no need for night court, the judges reason, if Dependency Court were housed elsewhere.

In addition, the city fire marshal in January issued a violation notice for the Criminal Courts Building, citing in particular areas being used for Dependency Court, such as the 12th floor elevator lobby that serves as a waiting room.

“At the time of the inspection, this area was grossly overcrowded; during a fire or other emergency this could create a very hazardous situation,” the violation notice said.

Over the last two years, several possible court sites have been suggested and rejected, including a two-court extension at MacLaren, the juvenile detention facility, that was projected to cost a prohibitive $2.5 million.

As a temporary measure, the court is now considering moving some of the dependency courtrooms to the UCLA Extension building at 1100 S. Grand Ave. while a permanent home is found, said Frank S. Zolin, county clerk and chief executive of the Superior Court.

Disagreements have centered on three issues:

- Should an old facility be reconverted to a court building or would a new building be more economical in the long run?

- Should the courts be split up and spread to locations that would be more convenient for people who live at a distance from downtown, or is a central facility necessary because of the many support services involved in Dependency Court?

- Is it possible to attract millions of private dollars to finance the project?

At present, the choices appear to have narrowed to four, three of them new buildings and the fourth a conversion of a department store.

The county administrative office recently disclosed that it favors the remodeling of a Sears, Roebuck & Co. facility on Fremont Avenue in Alhambra, which is scheduled to close soon. This site, County Administrative Officer James C. Hankla wrote in a recent letter to Zolin, “is clearly the most economical, the quickest to establish, and provides the best operating program environment.”

Since the store would accommodate only 20 courtrooms, an additional five-court satellite building would be constructed in Irwindale, not far from MacLaren.

According to Hankla, the Sears remodeling would cost $22 million and the Irwindale satellite an additional $6.6 million.

Zolin, while maintaining that the Sears facility is “workable,” warns that local opposition in Alhambra could delay the project indefinitely. Alhambra city officials oppose the conversion proposal because of its effect on tax revenues and redevelopment plans.

The court sees advantages in constructing a new building on one of three sites--two downtown (21st and Main streets or 1st Street and Beaudry Avenue), and a third on Centre Plaza Drive in Monterey Park. Projected costs range from $37 million to $42.2 million.

Court officials, who prefer a new, centrally located building, estimate that courtrooms make up only 40% of the facilities needed in the complex Dependency Court system.

Space must also be available for clerks and court reporters, for social workers and the attorneys from the county counsel’s office who represent them, for private attorneys appointed by the court to represent parents and/or children and for the Child Advocates Office, a network of volunteers who try to guide the children through the system.

Right now, some of these people must work in unventilated storage rooms that have been turned into offices.

A Dependency Court building must also have lockups for offending parents who are in custody and a so-called shelter care facility, where children in protective custody can wait for their cases to be heard.

“It would be an administrative nightmare to break off part of the court and put it somewhere else,” said Judge Todd.

In Zolin’s view, a new building also stands the best chance of attracting private donations. He estimates that $10 million may be available through fund raising, particularly since several members of the Children’s Services Commission, like Crawford, have ties to the entertainment industry.

Proponents of a partnership between the public and private sector point to a second-floor waiting room in the Criminal Courts Building as an example of what might be accomplished. Under the leadership of Supervisor Deane Dana’s office, private donations were obtained last year to convert an unused corridor into a child-oriented room with a television, toys, small-scale furniture and games.

They also cite the success of Orangewood, a 170-bed emergency care shelter that opened in Orange County in 1985. Eighty percent of the cost came from $7.8 million in private donations.

But at a meeting earlier this month to discuss the feasibility of private fund raising, some officials predicted that it would be much harder to raise money for a Dependency Court building than for a shelter like MacLaren Center.

Children’s Services Commissioner Tom Becket noted that some potential donors might balk at the idea of contributing to a government building. “If someone approached me and said, ‘Let’s build a courthouse,’ I’d say, ‘Thank you very much, but I’ve already paid my property tax this year,’ ” he said.

Amid the wrangling over relocating Dependency Courts, there is also talk about how to keep the system from mushrooming further.

Some court-appointed lawyers who serve on the Dependency Court panel complain that a significant proportion of cases should never have found their way to court in the first place.

Anthony Garcia, president-elect of the Los Angeles County Juvenile Courts Bar Assn., said there is an “overabundance” of cases in all categories--dirty home, drug use and physical and sexual abuse. “The consensus is there are too many matters before the Dependency Courts,” he said.

In 1985, 2,273 “petitions”--or cases--were dismissed before adjudication, while 3,284 went to trial and 10,586 were settled, according to Charlene Saunders, Dependency Courts coordinator. Garcia, however, contended that innocent parents sometimes admit wrongdoing to avoid a prolonged ordeal in court.

But both county and court officials concur that steps should be taken to weed out more of the cases before they come to court. Doing that would require additional social workers and better training of teachers and others in identifying child abuse and neglect.

“We have advocated more front-end screening to try to filter out the weak cases or those cases that really don’t require that the child come under the jurisdiction of the court,” Zolin said. “The concept’s clear, and I think everybody agrees with the concept.”