The Cycle of Crime : Over 20 years, times have changed, as have youngsters, offenses, the legal system and the Youth Guidance Center.

Joe is 16, a gang member and drug abuser, and in the last three years he has never been out of juvenile detention more than two months at a time.

The other day he sat in a cramped counselor’s office at the Youth Guidance Center, where he is doing his fourth stint, this time for violating probation. Away from the inquiring eyes of his blue-clad fellow inmates, he was reflective about his troubled young life.

“I do good for a little while but then I start hanging with my buddies and the same things happen again,” said Joe, which is not his real name. “Even if I’m in my own neighborhood, hanging around with my cousin or my brothers, I can get busted cause they’re all involved in gangs. I’m not supposed to be around them, but it’s not like I can go to another part of town.”

Anniversary Celebrated

Hundreds of youths like Joe walk the streets of Orange County these days, caught in a cycle of drugs, gangs and crime. First-time offenders, probation violators and youngsters who have committed more serious crimes and have done their time in Juvenile Hall are sentenced to the Youth Guidance Center, known as the YGC--four isolated cinder-block buildings nestled between the river and Interstate 5 in Santa Ana.

It was 20 years ago this month that the center first opened its doors to the county’s troubled youth. At a ceremony recently marking the anniversary, counselors and probation officials agreed that as the times have changed, so have the youngsters, the crimes, the legal system--and the role of the YGC.

“The kids are more criminally sophisticated now,” said Mike Schumacher, the county’s chief probation officer. “They seem to be more violence-prone and more drug-prone. It has created a more callous group of young people.”

The youngsters of 1969, however, were a different breed. They lived in the age of Aquarius, psychedelic music and distrust of authority. Most committed to the center were fairly innocent--runaways and truants--who may have dabbled with mind-altering drugs or were just too tough for their parents to handle, Schumacher said.

The YGC was established by the Orange County Probation Department as an open facility--a back door in each detention unit is always left open--aimed at rehabilitating them with education and counseling programs.

The law then permitted runaways, truants and any youth deemed incorrigible to be incarcerated, Schumacher said. There were far more girls than boys, since most runaways were girls, and they were kept there six months to a year, then released whenever it was determined that they had been rehabilitated.

Originally, there were no fences around the grounds and the newly arrived wards felt no compulsion to stick around, he said. Eventually a fence was erected, not to keep the inmates in but to keep out vagrants who had lived on the site for years and still loitered near the dumpsters.

While the task of the YGC has remained the same over the years, it has been made more difficult because of changes in the system--changes that YGC officials say render many of their programs less effective.

The key factor was the passage in 1977 of a law requiring determinant sentencing for juvenile offenders. Fixed sentences meant that juvenile authorities no longer had as much leeway in deciding when a ward should be released. Sentences at the YGC now average 33 days.

And public attitudes about the merits of rehabilitation have shifted.

Society now wants foremost to punish juvenile lawbreakers, and at the least get them off the streets, according to criminologists and others involved in the juvenile justice system.

“What we are seeing is the pendulum of public opinion,” said Bruce V. Malloy, administrator of the Juvenile Justice Commission, a court-appointed group that oversees juvenile facilities in the county. “Over a decade or so it has swung from a heavy emphasis on treatment to a heavy emphasis on punishment. The system has to respond to that.”

According to county probation researchers, the proportion of first-time offenders committed to a county youth facility rose from 19% in 1982 to 36% in 1987. And the number probably increased to the 40%-to-50% range during 1988, said Gwen Kurz, director of research for the Probation Department.

“We’re locking up kids much more,” Kurz said. “But because of that, we may be taking away from the limited resources that we have for follow-up (treatment). The benefits are questionable.”

YGC Director Richard Duckworth agrees: “We spend a lot of our time just processing kids in and out.

“We have nearly a 100% turnover every month. Our job is to try to identify problems as quickly as possible and try to coordinate follow-up treatment.”

Many youngsters are also far more emotionally disturbed than those of two decades ago.

“They are more abused, more mentally disturbed; they have more severe problems,” Juvenile Justice Commission member Ellen Wilcox said.

Probation officials say that more than 75% of those who leave the YGC and the county’s two other juvenile facilities--Joplin Youth Center in Trabuco Canyon and Los Pinos Rehabilitation Camp in Lake Elsinore--never return.

Most of these youngsters, they say, are scared straight by their first brushes with the law.

Kurz said many juvenile authorities now believe that emphasis should be placed on identifying problem youths and intervening at an early stage.

“We can identify 95% of these problem kids the first time they are referred to us and the rest by the second time we see them,” Kurz said. “We need to focus our attention on the intake process. I feel strongly that we can work with these kids in the community rather than extend their sentences and have them come back and back.”

Despite problems in the system, officials still believe that the YGC and its programs can work.

The youngsters are assigned to one of five units, or pods, each of which houses 25. Within each unit, several bedrooms are grouped around a common meeting area. One of the units is co-ed--older girls are grouped with younger boys.

Wards spend about six hours each day in classes at the Rio Contigua School, located on the grounds. Each unit has a deputy probation counselor who conducts a weekly group session. Counselors also meet regularly with individual wards.

In addition, there are alcohol and drug abuse counseling, image awareness and decision-making sessions, and parenting and human sexuality counseling.

The wards also receive work assignments in the laundry and kitchen, but also might be assigned to prune the orange and peach trees on the spacious grounds.

For Joe, the center has meant a respite from the more restrictive confines of Juvenile Hall and the violence of the streets. But he is still uncertain of his future.

“There is more freedom here than in the (Juvenile) hall and being here helps me to stay clean,” he said. “But it’s like a vacation. I’m getting my strength back for when I get back to reality outside.”