Juvenile Camps in Jeopardy : State Budget Cuts Threaten Program That Helps Young Offenders

Curtis is 15 with heavily muscled arms and, at times, a heavily muscled head. He doesn’t like listening to other people’s advice or orders. That’s why he’s been at Camp Kilpatrick in Malibu for 10 months instead of the six months that the average teen-age inmate spends at the juvenile probation camp.

But gradually Curtis is getting the point. “I’m learning to hold back what I say,” said the youth, who was placed at Kilpatrick as a ward of the Juvenile Court after being arrested for driving with a loaded firearm and selling drugs. Later this month, he expects to go home to South Los Angeles, return to high school and give life on the outside another shot.

This is the kind of anecdote--a small moment of introspection that is at once unremarkable and increasingly meaningful to a society terrified of gun-toting teen-agers--people tell when they describe the value of institutions such as Kilpatrick, one of 14 Los Angeles County juvenile camps whose future has been thrown into limbo by proposed state budget cuts.

Gov. George Deukmejian’s budget would cut state funds for probation camps, drug treatment and drug abuse prevention facilities to $30.4 million from $67.3 million. Los Angeles County probation officials say they cannot make up the difference and will have to close the camps unless the Legislature pressures the governor to change his mind or ultimately overrides him with a two-thirds vote.

Closure of the camps will force Los Angeles County’s Juvenile Court judges to make individual decisions on whether to send the camps’ 1,660 boys and 110 girls to the much harsher facilities of the California Youth Authority or simply release them.

Both alternatives are viewed with alarm by the deputy probation officers who staff the camps and many other members of the criminal justice community. They characterize the camps as a last chance to rehabilitate younger gang members and other “at-risk” youths through a dramatic change of environment that meshes discipline, counseling and a full day of academic instruction with low student-to-teacher ratios. And they regard the proposed budget cut as utter hypocrisy in a political climate where so much lip service has been paid to the need for drug and gang prevention programs.

“I just can’t imagine being a Juvenile Court judge in Los Angeles County and not having access to the camps,” said Inglewood Juvenile Court Judge Roosevelt Dorn, who is widely considered the county’s sternest Juvenile Court judge. “As a general rule I consider myself having failed with a child when I send a child to Youth Authority.”

Dorn said the camps’ combination of discipline and education makes them “one of the most effective programs we have to deal with these youngsters. . . . On a regular basis I send youngsters to camps who read at the second- or third-grade level, and nine months later they come out reading on the sixth- and seventh-grade level.”

Corrupting Influence

By contrast, Dorn said, Youth Authority facilities, which generally house hard-core teen-agers and where the average stay is 23 months, are a corrupting influence.

“The youngsters that can be saved, you don’t send them to CYA,” he said. “I don’t know what I would do” if the camps were closed. “I may ask to transfer out of Juvenile Court. I do not want to be placed in a position where I am programming youngsters for the state penitentiary.”

Once Dorn declares a young offender to be a ward, he can send them home on probation, assign them to a foster home, commit them to a county camp or send them to the CYA. Last year, Los Angeles County’s Juvenile Court judges sent 4,047 teen-agers to camps scattered from San Dimas to Malibu to Lancaster. (They sent another 1,600 teen-agers and young adults to CYA facilities.)

‘I Was Really Hostile’

Ten of the camps are “open” facilities, intended for youths who are younger or are being placed for less-dangerous crimes. The other four, like Kilpatrick, are “closed,” with fences and lock-up rooms where youths can be placed in solitary confinement for persistent misbehavior. Probation officers crack down particularly hard on signs of gang affiliation such as shouting a gang’s name or flashing a gang hand sign. Time served can be increased for such offenses.

“I had friends who’d been in camp,” Curtis said, “and when they heard I was going to go they said it was cool, you just come in, kick back, do your little (school) program. I found out it’s not like that. You’ve got someone telling you to do something every minute. When I came in, I was really hostile. I started messing up. Now, I still don’t like listening to the staff but I know I got to listen to them.”

“Many of these children have not had a structure in their life,” said Geri Wright, a probation officer who is Kilpatrick’s casework supervisor. “We tell them things like, ‘Get that ugly look off your face,’ ‘Watch your language,’ ‘Pay attention to how you answer people.’

“One thing that amazes me,” said Wright, who came to Kilpatrick two years ago after working as a field probation officer, “is that many of them don’t want to leave. They’ll say, ‘I can’t make it back there’ in their neighborhoods.”

Same Dilemma

Kwasi Geiggar, the coordinator of a Los Angeles school district program that places returning youngsters in public schools, often at new campuses to guard against flare-ups of old gang rivalries, said he witnesses the same dilemma on the outside.

“When kids come out of the camps, at least 90% of them have changed as to their personal approach, how they deal with things,” Geiggar said. “But even though they come back more normal, a lot of them end up running afoul of the law because of the environment they go back to.”

Geiggar estimated that 60% of the Los Angeles school district youths who go through juvenile camps “keep themselves straight.”

However, the only state study of camp inmate recidivism found a much lower rate of reform. California Youth Authority researchers, who tracked teen-agers released from county camps in 1982, said that 65% were convicted of new crimes by 1984. (The CYA estimates that the rate of recidivism among inmates of CYA facilities is now 56%.)

‘A Time-Out’

Such statistics do not dampen the enthusiasm of camp proponents.

“The kids who leave here don’t come out any harder,” said Curt Amundson, a deputy probation officer who has worked at Kilpatrick for 18 years and is the camp’s sports coordinator. “Most of them come out softer. . . . What they get here is a time-out.”

Amundson gestured past the window of the camp’s administrative building, which looks out on a grassy field surrounded by the Santa Monica Mountains. A line of youths, most dressed in the camp’s blue fatigues, their hands behind their backs as required by the staff, were walking past.

“See him?” Amundson pointed at a youth who he said had been a star football player at a Long Beach high school. “Yesterday he learned that one of his closest friends had been shot and killed near school. He came in to talk with his probation officer and broke down. ‘What’s going to happen to me when I go back?’ he was saying. Should he try to find another place to live? We spent hours with him yesterday. I don’t think that would happen in CYA.”

‘Play a Hunch’

CYA spokesman Tony Cimarusti said it was inaccurate to portray camp inmates as uniformly redeemable. He said a substantial number of camp inmates are hard-core offenders who could be appropriately transferred to CYA facilities if the camps closed. “In many cases there are kids who a judge could have sent to CYA but simply decided to play a hunch and give them another chance,” he said.

Amundson said he does not believe that the camps will be closed because CYA facilities are already severely overcrowded and because public opinion will not accept the mass release of teen-agers from the camps. Kilpatrick’s director, Charles Turner, agreed, saying, “The odds are pretty good it won’t come to pass.”

A state criminal justice source familiar with the budget conflict said, “It’s a slam-dunk (certainty) that the Legislature will restore the money. The question is whether the governor will go along.”

The Health and Welfare subcommittee of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee voted Monday to restore the cuts to what is formally known as the County Justice System Subvention Program. However, that was only a preliminary step in the tortuous budget process.

Cuts Defended

Deukmejian’s budget spokesmen have defended the cuts by saying simply that they are part of an across-the-board effort to balance the state budget.

That reasoning, the criminal justice source said, was the most maddening aspect of the controversy.

“Nobody in the policy area was consulted by the budget people,” he said. “They simply funded the state-mandated programs” in the subvention program, such as crisis counseling for juveniles, which the state is required by law to finance, “and cut out everything else.”