A Last Chance for Troubled Kids : Juvenile justice: After O.C.’s Los Pinos probation camp, the next stop for youths caught up in gangs is adult jail.

Even from their remote mountainside vantage point, the veteran counselors at the Los Pinos probation camp have seen, with disheartening clarity, the allure of Orange County’s gang culture.

As the violent gang lifestyle claims a larger and younger group of youths in the county’s distant urban neighborhoods, its toll is reflected here, among the shady pines of this low-security outpost for teen-age boys near Lake Elsinore.

“Things have evolved to the point where we’re getting some pretty dangerous kids here,” said Gary Chadwick, a probation counselor who arrived at Los Pinos in 1975. “We used to get incorrigibles, truants and runaways, but not anymore. Now we’re getting so many more sophisticated gangsters up here that we have to be wary.”

The camp now amounts to a last exit for these youths traveling quickly on a road to more serious crime, said Chief County Probation Officer Michael Schumacher. “Los Pinos is the last chance they’re going to get before stepping into the adult world,” Schumacher said. “The next stop is (Sheriff) Brad Gates’ jail.”

Since 1991, only felons have been committed to the 125-bed camp, which has neither fences nor armed guards. Bitter gang fights erupt almost weekly and escapes last year topped 120--nearly 20% of the camp’s overall caseload of 629.

That accelerating shift toward more violent inmates can be traced back to the streets of Orange County, where juvenile felony arrests increased 63% from 1987 to 1991 and continue to mount.

Compounding problems, as the legion of wayward boys grows, their stints at Los Pinos shrink. A decade ago, the average stay was six months. By 1991, it had contracted to 113 days and this year is down to 78 days. As they contend with this parade of new faces, the counselors’ strongest reform tactic, one-on-one counseling, evaporates.

“You get this feeling you’re just filling up beds, just keeping these kids busy until they can get back to the streets,” said Jesse Garcia, a probation counselor. “But if you can get just one a year, it keeps you going. Just one you know will make it.”

Garcia has a handful of photos of smiling young men, some in military uniforms, others holding infants, that made his cherished list of survivors. But the intimidating, bearded Garcia also can rattle off the names of the boys who returned to the guns, drugs and drive-bys, a path that for many led to jail or death.

“There was this one real nice kid who I thought might turn it around, but then I heard he got in with the gang again and ended up shooting two kids,” Garcia said. “He didn’t mean to, but it happened. It’s hard to hear stuff like that.”

Stories laced with tragedy and punctuated by gunfire are ubiquitous among the boys toiling on Los Pinos labor crews or studying at its modest on-site high school. One of the most compelling stories belongs to Arbey, a fearsome, hulking 17-year-old who has visited two dozen area high schools to share his cautionary tale of gangs and their costly membership dues.

“I tell them about the places they don’t want to be and the people they don’t want to know,” the soft-spoken Santa Ana youth said. “Some of the kids laughed, some didn’t care. But some listened and tried to understand. A lot of them won’t know what it’s all about until it happens to them.”

For Arbey, gangbanging and drug-dealing began at age 12 and reached a fever pitch two years ago with the death of his girlfriend, who was shot four times by members of a rival gang. With his head hung low, Arbey explained that he was with his homeboys on a drive-by shooting when his girlfriend died, and that the sight of her bloodied body in a hospital emergency room would haunt him forever.

“I don’t care what they do or think,” he said, swatting away some of the flies that each summer beset the onetime site of a Juaneno Indian village. He looked over to a group of rowdy inmates laughing and comparing tattoos. “I need out.”

While troubled boys have filed through Los Pinos since it opened in 1970, Schumacher said changes in state law and county policy have resulted in today’s tougher clientele at all four county probation facilities, which have a total of 559 beds.

In 1977, state lawmakers decided truants and runaways could no longer be held in county detention facilities, shifting the focus of Los Pinos’ open compound to more criminal teens. That shift became more dramatic when, in 1991, county officials responded to overcrowding systemwide by declaring felonies and gang-related misdemeanors as the only offenses that would warrant a stay in juvenile detention facilities.

“It’s a question of who you are going to spend your time and money on,” Schumacher said.

Last year, of the 629 felons who were held at Los Pinos, 187 had been there before. They had either finished their time or escaped to be recaptured. Among the 350 teens who passed through the camp’s gates from January to June this year, 113 were recidivists.

At Los Pinos, trouble seems to dog a rangy Anaheim 16-year-old serving time for stabbing a street rival in the chest. He spoke with conviction about his hopes of becoming a model citizen, but those plans were set back last month when, two days before his release, he got into a fistfight with another inmate over a neighborhood insult.

The scuffle earned the unrepentant teen an extended sentence and an orange vest, the camp staff’s way of marking troublemakers who can’t roam unsupervised. The boy--who advertises his home county allegiance with a tattooed ‘O’ on one shoulder and a ‘C’ on the other--seemed surprised to be asked whether the fight was worth it.

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I want to be better, but that doesn’t mean I’m going let somebody put me down. I don’t know when I’m getting out now, though. But I hope it’s soon, so I can see my girlfriend and our 10-month-old baby.”

Reform-minded homeboys are easy to find in Los Pinos, be they car thieves, dope dealers, taggers or just your average gangbanger.

Most of the inmates, all between ages 16 and 18, have plotted escape routes from the streets--school, a job, the military--but the camp staff knows that many trapdoors await the youths when they leave the sequestered mountainside refuge.

“When they’re here it’s simple, because they have work to do and us to push them the right way,” probation counselor Kathy Martin said. “But when they get back out there, there are different rules. When I tell some of them how well they’re doing, they say, ‘But I can’t be like this out there, my homeys wouldn’t like it. I couldn’t survive.’ ”

Phil, 17, a dour member of Garden Grove’s Vietnamese for Life gang doing three months for a weapons conviction, offers a more cynical view. “They just say they won’t get in trouble when they get out because that’s what you want to hear. You can’t get out of it once you start. Most don’t even want to.”

For boys like Phil who remain undaunted in their allegiance to the gangster life, there are two options: patiently do their time, or risk more trouble by bolting. So far this year, 39 teens selected the second alternative.

With no fences, no barred dorm windows and work crews that often drift far from the compound, it is not hard to escape. Because phones are in the dorms, would-be escapees have arranged for a ride to be waiting at the foot of the steep two-mile road that winds up to the camp from Ortega Highway.

Counselors, who are instructed to think of their own safety first, generally do not pursue fleeing inmates. Stronger structural security measures are not an option, Schumacher said, because Los Pinos sits on land the county leases from the U.S. Forestry Service, an agency with strict policies prohibiting security facilities.

But, counselor Kirk Gardner said, even if shackles or gates fringed with barbed wire were available to dissuade escapees, counselors would object to their installation. To block the open world out and treat the boys like irredeemable criminals would compromise the camp’s goal of being more a community than a jail.

“That openness would seem to be our greatest weakness, but it is actually our greatest asset,” said Gardner, who concedes that the approach worked better when he arrived at Los Pinos 19 years ago, a time when fewer boys came and stayed longer.

“There is a higher violence quotient among the kids now, but if they have been looking for a change and there have been environmental obstacles, then this is the place for them.”

Nevertheless, the numbers are daunting and have grown more disheartening each of the 14 years that counselor Dana Foust has worked at Los Pinos. As he watched his crew clear weeds along the Ortega Highway, Foust wondered aloud about the gangs’ hold on kids.

“Environment plays a big part, of course, and urbanization and the economy,” said Foust, who has already heard his 10-year-old son bring home stories of gangs and drugs at school. “It’s scary stuff.”

As cars whizzed by, Foust kept a fatherly eye on the collection of gangbangers and car thieves that make up his extended felonious family. “I’m telling you, they’re good kids,” he said. “But what they want, like everybody else, is a shot at it.”

He called out for the sweating, slouching teens to knock off work for the day, and he watched as they gathered their tools and ambled toward the van, all of them felons with a chance to start over upon the arrival of adulthood.

“We’ve got all these lost kids and they’re looking for acceptance, a place to belong,” he said. “And they are going to find it. Either from us or the gangs.”