Judge Orders Population Cap at S.D. Juvenile Hall

Plagued by “chronic and corrosive” overcrowding, San Diego County’s Juvenile Hall has become a demeaning “kiddie prison” that abuses the basic rights of desperately needy children, a judge ruled Thursday, announcing a cap on population levels at the facility.

Crowding at the hall is so bad, San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert J. O’Neill said, it threatens sanitary conditions, leads to sexual assaults and disrupts the hall’s central mission of providing a home-like atmosphere for rehabilitating wayward or troubled youths.

Ruling in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, O’Neill set a population cap of 395 at the hall, which was built to hold 219 youths but has held 400 or more in recent years.

The financially strapped county, which admitted during a lengthy trial that the Kearny Mesa hall is an unsuitable place, has long claimed it is doing the best it can with limited resources. O’Neill said Thursday that is not good enough. If necessary, he said, he is prepared to order the county treasury to pay for proper care at the hall.

The judge’s ruling signals another significant victory for the ACLU in its quest to ease crowding at the county’s detention facilities. Since 1977, the ACLU has either won outright or struck favorable settlements in a variety of court cases addressing crowding at the county’s adult jails and Juvenile Hall.

ACLU suits have led to court-ordered caps on the inmate populations at County Jail downtown and at five suburban jails. Two years ago, the ACLU filed suit to stem overcrowding at Juvenile Hall, claiming youths there were being deprived of a “safe, decent living environment.”

State law demands that a county’s juvenile hall be as much like a home as possible. But O’Neill ruled Thursday that conditions at San Diego County’s hall so violate basic constitutional rights that just being there amounts to punishment, even for young children not charged with a crime.

Betty Wheeler, the ACLU’s legal director in San Diego, said Thursday that she is “guardedly optimistic” about the effects of O’Neill’s ruling.

“The judge has painted a very realistic picture of the way in which conditions at the hall have deprived children of their constitutional rights to a safe and decent environment,” she said.

“But painting the picture and even, of course, issuing orders doesn’t solve the problem,” Wheeler said. “We will be watching very closely and monitoring very closely to see that these orders translate into reality.”

“We have been around enough times to know that this is the beginning, not the end,” she said.

The county’s own records show that Juvenile Hall has been severely crowded since 1979.

Two days before the trial in the ACLU’s suit began last November, population at the hall reached 422. There was testimony that rooms designed for one were sleeping three. Some children spent the night on mattresses on the floor.

The trial featured detailed testimony about sexual assaults, food shortages, gang fights, bugs--even denial of the basic right to go to the bathroom.

At night, according to Thursday’s ruling, youths who want to visit the toilet must throw a switch that turns on a light in the hallway outside the locked bedroom door. That light is designed to alert a staff member, who is supposed to escort the minor to the bathroom.

The reality, O’Neill said, is that many of the minors become so discouraged or discomforted by long waits that they opt to urinate or defecate in a towel, or urinate out a window. Over the years, the judge said, so many teen-age boys urinated out windows that steel bars corroded and had to be replaced.

“Much of this description of the present-day reality of Juvenile Hall would be troubling to the average citizen even if it were describing an adult prison,” much less a hall for “young, weak, confused, angry children,” O’Neill said.

In addition, a “significant portion” of the youngsters at the hall, he said, are “victims of long-term sexual abuse and parental neglect.”

O’Neill ordered an immediate cap of 395 minors. He allowed a 10% cushion, or up to 434, for “periodic rapid fluctuations in intake.” Last week, the hall housed an average of 361 youths, down from the start of the trial. But, the judge said, it is clear that the “ever-changing population” will no doubt exceed 400 again.

Rooms designed for one sleeper must be limited to no more than two, and at least 35% of such rooms must be set aside for single sleepers with security or mental health needs, O’Neill ordered.

To assure safety, he said, any minor suspected of mental illness must be evaluated by a psychiatrist upon admission to the hall. If immediate treatment is necessary, it will be provided at county expense, he said.

At any given time, O’Neill said, about 25% of the youths at the hall have been through the court system and are awaiting placement in a special school, camp or California Youth Authority facility.

That placement must be speeded up, he said. He ordered that a Juvenile Court judge review any case in which a youth has languished for 15 days or more in the hall.

Despite his blunt findings of the “evils which the evidence shows have dogged this facility,” O’Neill did not fix the blame on the county Probation Department, which runs the hall on a daily basis.

Instead, he blamed the County Board of Supervisors, which funds the department, and the Juvenile Court, which is supposed to oversee the department.

The Probation Department, O’Neill said, has issued frequent calls for help and “labored mightily” to manage “this out-of-control system in a humane way.” But, in competition with “more powerful agencies of county government,” the department historically has been “politically, relatively impotent,” he said.

Gerard A. Williams, acting Probation Department chief, declined comment Thursday, saying he had not yet read O’Neill’s 90-page opinion.

County supervisors, O’Neill said, have been “largely sympathetic” to the department’s repeated requests for more staff and money. Even so, O’Neill said, the board has given Juvenile Hall “minimal and inadequate resources,” citing “severe financial limitations.” The county’s fiscal 1993 budget deficit is currently estimated at $29.6 million.

Bob Lerner, a county spokesman, said the board’s budget woes are the fault of the state, which traditionally has shortchanged San Diego County. Typically, the county ranks 57th of 58 counties in per-capita funding from the state, he said.

Lerner added: “These are tough times. The lingering recession has not bypassed county government.”

Tough times or no, O’Neill said, the board has fallen well short of its duty to safeguard the children at the hall.

For instance, he said, the board did authorize an addition to the hall, due to open within the next few weeks, that will raise the sleeping capacity from 219 beds to 339. But even before construction began, the hall had a daily population averaging 360 or more, meaning the facility is bound to remain “obsolete and inadequate,” O’Neill said.

As for the Juvenile Court, O’Neill said it is “difficult to avoid the painful observation” that the court had abandoned oversight of the hall to the Probation Department.

State law requires that the Juvenile Court make an annual inspection of the hall. But O’Neill, who served for 2 1/2 years as a Juvenile Court judge, said he had not known about that requirement until the ACLU brought suit. “I suspect I am not alone in this oversight,” he said.

Napoleon Jones, the current supervising judge at Juvenile Court, could not be reached Thursday for comment.

It may be, O’Neill said, that Juvenile Court judges consider themselves too burdened with a steady stream of cases involving brutality, violence and neglect to take on Juvenile Hall, where the problems appear “so overwhelming and seemingly insoluble.”

But, O’Neill said, under the law, that is no excuse.

“As hard fiscal times force government to cut back or abandon a wide array of no longer affordable social programs, we must look at the juvenile justice system and ask ourselves, ‘Can we afford it?’ ” O’Neill said.

“If the answer to that question is that we cannot, then how can we differentiate the plight of this system from that of the desperate, impoverished parent who, having been turned down for receipt of welfare funds, is nonetheless guilty of child neglect by (failing) to provide adequate housing, food, care and discipline for her children?”