ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : Juvenile Camps Worth Saving for Youths’ Sake : Facilities: They play an important role in helping to turn around the lives of delinquent teen-agers.

To realize the importance of juvenile camps to Orange County and the state, a couple of stories come to mind.

One is of a young man, now 26, who was a full-blown alcoholic as a teen-ager, committed criminal offenses, and spent nearly a year incarcerated at the Joplin Youth Center near Trabuco Canyon. At Joplin, he graduated from high school and began working part time at a nearby skeet range. Eleven years later, he is now working on campus at UCI and taking engineering courses at Cal State Long Beach. He says that if it wasn’t for Joplin, he would be dead now. To say “thank you” and give back to the system that helped him, he serves as a volunteer mentor and role model to young alcoholics and drug abusers at Juvenile Hall.

The other story involves a more recent “graduate,” a drug abuser and hard-core “gangbanger” released from Joplin a year ago. While at Joplin, he participated in Project MOVE, where he was among the initial group of five youths who provided one-on-one assistance to severely handicapped young children. The experience completely changed his life. He said that for years, he had been feeling sorry for himself. But after working with children with severe disabilities, he began realizing how truly lucky he was.

The young man was also introduced to sailing off the local coastline through another Joplin program called “Sail for Life.” He is doing well and serving as a skipper on “Sail for Life” outings with new Joplin recruits.

To be fair, not every teen-ager serving a court commitment in a juvenile camp turns his life around like these two. And incarceration in a juvenile camp may be only one reason why a youth turns away from crime and becomes an upstanding citizen. Nevertheless, these cases illustrate the impact that local corrections can have and illustrate a rehabilitative process we see taking place daily with some of the county’s most serious juvenile offenders.

Unfortunately, like never before, the future of juvenile camps is being threatened in Orange County, as well as elsewhere in the state. The Orange County Probation Department, along with all county agencies, has been asked to submit a budget with a 20% reduction in expenses for the fiscal year beginning July 1. The county of Orange is facing an unprecedented, $93.3-million budget deficit, in large part due to reduced revenue from a weak economy and from state funding cuts.

Probation in Orange County provides supervision for about 21,000 juveniles and adults on probation. Our officers also conduct investigations and write reports for the courts, collect restitution for crime victims, and operate the county’s work furlough program for jail inmates. But about 40% of our budget goes to running Juvenile Hall and three camps for juvenile offenders.

To make up most of our share of the budget deficit, we are forced to propose that two of the three juvenile camps be closed--the 60-bed, all-boys Joplin Youth Center and the 125-bed, co-ed Youth Guidance Center in northern Santa Ana.

Orange County is not the only county struggling to maintain its youth camps. Los Angeles County is facing the loss of 19 camps and other counties are hard-pressed as well. To address the problem, Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Brentwood) authored legislation to provide $33 million statewide to counties to operate their juvenile camps.

The legislation, AB 799, deserves our support. The alternatives to juvenile camps are not good. Typically, these teen-agers are repeat offenders: burglars, assailants or car thieves. They have committed offenses that warrant incarceration and the youths need structure in their lives, if they are to be treated and eventually rehabilitated. Yet we do not want to send hundreds more teen-agers each year to California Youth Authority institutions, where the most hardened offenders go. Nor is that alternative cost-effective. CYA institutions are already overcrowded and cost far more to operate than local juvenile camps.

Juvenile delinquency, unfortunately, will not simply go away because government runs out of money. As chief probation officer, I am in a position to appreciate the value of local juvenile camps in reforming wayward teen-agers. They are an important part of the juvenile justice system that is worth saving.