New Chief, Strict Rules Segregate Sexes at CYA’s Camarillo Compound

The California Youth Authority’s co-educational compound in Camarillo has a new superintendent--and a strict new set of rules aimed at halting forbidden sexual encounters between male and female inmates.

“Work crews working together, recreation-type activities together, parties, volunteers with co-ed programs--that’s now stopped,” said Manuel Carbajal, who took over Tuesday as head of the Ventura School.

Co-ed activities now are “limited to school and Sunday worship,” Carbajal added.

The facility’s inmates, 600 males and 250 females ranging in age from 14 to 24, long have been permitted no contact more intimate than hand-holding. But CYA officials have acknowledged to The Times that, since March, 1987, prisoners have paired off to conceive eight times in custody. Since June, 1988, officials said, they have reported 27 cases of consensual participation in sex acts.

The Camarillo facility is the CYA’s only co-educational institution, holding prisoners guilty of crimes from misdemeanors to homicide. It keeps virtually all of the Youth Authority’s female prisoners, housing them in separate buildings from males and overseeing the combined population with a staff of 450 and a network of video monitors.

Officials and prisoners said most illicit contact has occurred behind foliage in the 113-acre, campus-like compound or in unmonitored bathrooms.

Other co-educational juvenile institutions across the country, most of which serve populations of 300 or less, have reported no on-site conceptions. Youth Authority officials have described the situation as a symptom of the facility’s size and its prisoner population.

Several CYA critics, however, have blamed the problem on the Youth Authority’s unwillingness to allow birth control pills or contraceptives.

Carbajal, 47, a CYA administrator for 21 years whose last assignment was as superintendent of the Karl Holton School in Stockton, said illicit prisoner contact can be solved “almost immediately.” He said the ban on birth control and contraceptives would continue, because to allow them “would be condoning” illicit sex.

Assistant Supt. Kate Thompson, who temporarily took over the facility after the heart-attack death of Supt. Sylvester Carroway in April, estimated that male and female prisoners will spend only a fraction as much time together as in the past.

Thompson said the facility would ban “co-educational invitationals,” in which prisoners invite other prisoners for supervised social visits, along with co-educational presentations from volunteers. Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings are now separated by gender, she said, as are Bible study and choir meetings.

In addition, Thompson said, the institution has segregated most of its inmate work crews by sex and revised its policies so that males use hall passes in the morning and females use them in the afternoon.

Further plans, Carbajal said, call for greater emphasis on sex education in health classes and more discussion of the consequences of casual sex.

“We’re going to talk about what happens when you become parents,” Carbajal said. “There’s going to be a lot of intensified-type counseling.”