CAMARILLO : Youth Facility to Get Electronic Fence

A new fence will be installed at the Ventura School in Camarillo where four young inmates escaped in May, authorities said Friday.

The California Youth Authority facility had been scheduled to get the electronic fence and a television-monitoring system before May 26, when four young men escaped through a two-foot-wide gash in the current chain-link fence.

But finding a contractor to build the fence at an acceptable price delayed construction, spokeswoman Sarah Andrade said.

“If the bidding process had gone faster, the fence would have been up” before the escape, Andrade said.

The four escapees, two of whom had been convicted of murder, are still at large.

The new fence, which will be built by a San Jose company, will be about the same height as the existing one, Andrade said. But television cameras will be set up along the top.

The fence will contain electronic sensors that prompt the cameras to focus on any section that is touched. The school’s security guards will monitor the TV monitors for escape attempts.

The Ventura School, which houses 865 male and female convicts between the ages of 16 and 25, is the third largest of the youth authority’s 11 institutions. It is the last school to get the new electronic security system.

Construction and testing of the fence and monitoring system are expected to be complete by the end of January, Andrade said.