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Doing Time : Camp Glenn Rockey Gives Juvenile Offenders a Chance to Fight Back

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<i> Kondo is a San Gabriel free-lance writer </i>

It has been a year since Nick has been near the angry guns and knives of his neighborhood. It has been a year in which his mind and body have been cleansed of PCP, cocaine and alcohol. The explosive bouts of anger are gone. He is on the honor roll at school.

For Nick, 17, who was convicted of vandalism and possession of guns and knives, school is Camp Glenn Rockey, a Los Angeles County juvenile probation camp in San Dimas.

“I’m scared to get back out,” said Nick, who has spent the last year at the camp. “I don’t have anyone to tell me to do things. No one is going to tell me when to eat and how to line up or to go to school.”

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Situated on an eight-acre wooded hilltop that overlooks the Pomona Valley, Camp Glenn Rockey might be mistaken for a private boys school. But its rigid morning-to-night schedule and strict adherence to a merit system dispels any such impression.

Each youth is assigned to a 10- or 12-member group: the Jets, Vikings, Chargers or squad named for a football team. The groups are diverse, made up of teen-agers with different criminal histories, racial backgrounds and gang affiliations, to make it easier to maintain harmony in the camp. For the length of their stay, the boys eat, sleep and line up for roll call as a group.

Nick and other juvenile offenders at the camps are thrust into a boot camp-like regimen of discipline, counseling, school and work. Most of the youths are in the camps for at least six months. For many of them, probation camp is the first place they’ve ever been where every hour of the day is structured and nearly every aspect of their behavior is monitored.

As wards of the Juvenile Court, these youths are considered good candidates for rehabilitation and have been sent to one of the county’s 15 camps instead of the more hard-core facilities of the California Youth Authority.

Gov. George Deukmejian has proposed cutting $36.8 million in state aid to counties, and if the governor prevails, Los Angeles County probation officials say they will have to close all but one of the camps.

“The majority of kids would have to be returned to the community,” said Gene De Soto, deputy director of the Residential Treatment Services Bureau, which oversees the county camps. He said a small number of youths would go to CYA, which he described as the “graduate school of crime.” The young people who come out of CYA, he said, are “sophisticated and hardened.”

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Originally established in 1931 as part of the federal Civilian Conservation Corps, Camp Glenn Rockey is the oldest juvenile camp in the county. Camp Director Warren Foster remembers when Glenn Rockey was a “healthy drive from anywhere” in the 1950s and there was “no freeway, just two-lane farm roads and a lot of vegetable stands.

Today rural fields and horses have been replaced by new housing tracts and commuter traffic. Two years ago, the camp met its first neighbors--a development of homes just a stone’s throw to the east of the camp.

San Dimas Mayor Terry Dipple acknowledged that a few homeowners have complained about the lights from the camp at night and occasional excessive noise, but he said he opposes closing the camps if it means returning the youngsters to their neighborhoods.

“They were put there for a reason because they broke the law, so I am opposed to putting them back on the street,” Dipple said. “As a maximum-security camp it should be the last one to be closed. (Closing it) could have a serious impact on crime in the entire area.”

Ann Vackrinos, who has lived next to Glenn Rockey for two years and thinks of it more as a boys’ school than a probation camp, also opposes any closures that would send some of the youths home. “I don’t think they ought to be removed unless there was a place to put them.”

Foster says part of the funding threat is that too many people are not aware of the camp and its purpose.

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“Cops are glad to get these kids off the street, principals are glad to get them out of school and neighbors are happy they aren’t breaking into their homes,” he said. “But we are like a poor relative. They send us cards once in awhile, but they don’t visit us.”

Glenn Rockey officials and counselors say the juvenile camps can make a lasting and positive impact on young offenders. Their belief in the camp’s impact on the teen-agers is based on years of personal follow-up of former inmates.

“Maybe they won’t commit a crime, or do it as often,” said Terry Lund, a deputy probation officer who counsels and supervises inmates.

A Tough Struggle

Lund, who is Nick’s probation officer, said that when Nick first arrived at Glenn Rockey he was defiant and quick to start fights. She said Nick’s files were thick with documented reports of child abuse, drug abuse, imprisonment of both parents, gang activity by his father, and foster homes for Nick and his twin brother. Today, Nick, who had dropped out of high school, is getting A’s and Bs at the camp school.

She attributes Nick’s turn-around to the highly structured life at the camp and to substance-abuse counseling. But she acknowledged that Nick still faces a tough struggle to stay away from alcohol and drugs after his scheduled release next month to a private home for boys.

“Because they are kids, we realize a lot of the problem is their environment,” Lund said. “And some of them go back to the same things.”

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There are dozens of youths with troubled backgrounds like Nick’s among the 125 adolescents, ages 16 to 18, housed at Camp Glenn Rockey. One of the county’s four maximum security camps, Glenn Rockey is bounded by a 14-foot-high fence and has a 20-bed solitary confinement unit.

Many of the youths have a history of serious crime and may have been sent from one of the county’s 10 camps for juveniles who committed less-dangerous crimes.

Behavior Modification

“Everything we do is behavior modification,” Foster, the camp director, said. The boys, he said, are scrutinized throughout the day. Their bunks must be tidy; they must sit with their hands on their knees and with eyes forward before line-up, and their school and work performances must measure up.

Every assessment of their behavior is translated into points. The logs that keep track of the points, Foster said, look “like a CPA’s tax training manual.”

Good behavior in the dorm for a week is rewarded with 170 points. A good week in school can earn a boy 90 points and a week on the honor roll can mean 135 points. Those with exemplary behavior can earn enough points to knock days off of their camp sentence.

Any gang activity, such as flashing gang signs or using gang language, is punished by a minimum seven-day stay in the “box,” an 8-by-12-foot cinder-block cell in the solitary confinement unit. In addition, 30 days are added to their camp time.

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Foster said fist fights that last a punch or two break out every couple of weeks. In his four years as director, however, there have been only one or two brawls that involved several inmates. “In the streets they would kill each other,” he said. “But . . . we are an institution where even the worst kids don’t want to mess up.”

‘Dead Week’

If a youth fails to achieve enough points for the week, it is considered a “dead week” that is not credited toward completion of his camp sentence. A particularly troublesome boy’s three-month stay, for example, might be extended to six months to make up for “dead weeks.”

About half of the youths have a job either in grounds maintenance, laundry, the kitchen or school. The most coveted jobs are as cook assistants, 12-hour jobs that begin before sunrise and end after dinner. Cook assistants get job experience and 200 points a week.

All boys must attend at least three hours of school daily. There is one teacher for every 17 students, and instruction is on an individualized basis. Each month, at least two or three boys graduate or pass a high school equivalency exam.

For some youths, like 16-year-old Jermaine, school is a chance to brush up on remedial skills. In his six months at Camp Glenn Rockey, Jermaine’s reading ability jumped from fifth- to 11th-grade level.

“When I get out I want to go to school,” he said confidently. “I also want to play football.”

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Camp officials at Glenn Rockey are proud of their success stories, but are clearly recognize the pitfalls the youngsters face when they leave.

Parents Are the Cause

“You do what you can and hope that the time away will help them,” probation officer Lund said. “But in a lot of cases, the parents are the cause of the problem.”

Reliable figures on recidivism are hard to come by. The only state study of probation camp recidivism, done in 1982, tracked 73 boys from Camp Glenn Rockey for 24 months after they left camp. Nearly 62% of the youths were convicted of subsequent crimes during that time.

“I doubt if those numbers will hold after a study about 1984-85 kids is completed,” Foster said. His experience in the last several years has convinced him that the 1982 survey numbers have turned around, and that only 35% of the boys commit later crimes and 65% keep clean records.

“I also think you can have kids who are convicted of a felony the first time and later on, it maybe a misdemeanor on alcohol. The numbers don’t tell us those things, “ he added.

If there is a recurring cause for juvenile delinquency, Foster said it is probably drug-related. He estimated that at least 80% of the teen-agers in his camp have some type of substance-abuse problem and the effects stay in their system for a long time.

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Return to Productive Life

“A kid may suddenly slow down in speech and actions. I’ll ask him what is going on and he’ll tell me that he is tripping,” Foster said.

Some youths are able to overcome their drug problem and return to a productive life.

One of them, John Dahlquist of San Pedro, remembers himself as “a 17-year-old who used his fists before talking about what angered him.” At Glenn Rockey he learned to control his temper and sought drug counseling. His probation officer was impressed with his improvement and encouraged him to take the Army’s entrance exam. He did well on the exam, and a juvenile judge terminated the remainder of his probation. Dahlquist, 21, has served three years in the Army at Fort Dix, N.J., and is engaged to be married.

“Without the camps kids would be dead in the streets or in a hospital for a long time,” Dahlquist said. “If I didn’t have camp, I would have been one of those people.”

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