A ‘Siege Mentality’ at Juvenile Hall : Justice: Guardian describes mistreatment and says staff members don’t seem to care about the county’s errant teens.

A specially appointed guardian for Juvenile Hall detainees testified Tuesday that the county facility’s caring, reform-oriented attitude of 20 years ago has given way to a “siege mentality” in which errant teens are treated with little respect.

Testifying in a civil-rights lawsuit that challenges the way adolescents are treated in Juvenile Hall, attorney Michael D. Pursell said staff members unnecessarily escalate confrontations with detainees by having “an attitude of macho-ness . . . barking orders, standing up and squaring off chest-to-chest with someone. . . . That’s the tone and it’s designed for one thing: confrontation.”

Pursell said he was stunned to learn how the system had changed since he frequented the Orange facility as a juvenile public defender two decades ago.

“The prevailing attitude among the custodial staff (then) was paternalistic protectionism,” Pursell said. “We were there to help the kids and protect the kids.

“Yeah, there were some hard cases . . . but never did they need to be abused or hurt, never was there first-strike, preemptive punishment. The idea was to do everything possible to get the kid straightened out.”

Now, “it’s a siege mentality,” Pursell testified. “It’s pervasive.”

In an interview, Pursell said staff members appear to believe they are not there “to contribute anything positive,” but that “their sole function is to control the (detainees’) behavior.”

Pursell was appointed by Superior Court Judge Linda McLaughlin to make sure the youngsters’ interests were protected as they pressed the class-action suit, in which the Youth Law Center in San Francisco and the American Civil Liberties Union seek to end the use of soft-tie restraints at Juvenile Hall and restrict the use of “rubber rooms.”

Pursell said interviews with more than 30 youths who had spent time in the facility, where most detainees await trial on criminal charges, found stories of mistreatment and showed that troubled adolescents receive inadequate psychiatric care.

On the witness stand, Pursell described the discipline imposed on a severely disturbed 12-year-old boy named Vincent, a physically small and emotionally “fragile” youth. After Vincent refused to stop sounding the buzzer in his room for permission to go to the restroom, he was ultimately bound to a bed.

When Vincent pleaded to go to the bathroom, he was told to shut up, Pursell said. When the child urinated in his pants, he was untied and ordered to clean the soiled bedsheets, then he was sent to his room and locked inside for 24 hours, Pursell said.

When Pursell interviewed Vincent in November at Napa State Hospital, where he is confined for mental illness, Vincent expressed “absolute terror” of Juvenile Hall, Pursell said.

David G. Epstein, a private lawyer representing the county, implied in his questioning of Pursell that perhaps Vincent’s story cannot be trusted because he is mentally ill. But Pursell said his years as a public defender had honed his lie-detection skills and that “there was no doubt” Vincent was telling the truth.

Pursell told of another mentally disturbed youth, Michael G., who was held in an all-female lockup at the county’s Youth Guidance Center in Santa Ana. Pursell said the girls in the lock-up with Michael took turns watching him because he was suicidal and the staff was ignoring him.

“I don’t know why he was in there,” Pursell said. “That poor child belonged in a (psychiatric) hospital. The fact that he was even in there boggles my mind.”

Pursell contrasted the treatment of juveniles to that of women in Orange County jails and said the children suffered by comparison. Grown females were treated with “professionalism and concern,” he said.

“That was the antithesis of what I experienced in the juvenile system,” Pursell testified.