Harsh Rites of Passage : Youth: Residents of the Independent Living Program apartments come from foster care and the juvenile justice system. Now they must find their place in society with none of the resources most of us take for granted.

A ’64 bug, one pair of jeans and three bottles of ketchup in the fridge: Jason Barnett hasn’t much to show for his 20 years. But he must make do.

A veteran of foster care and juvenile camps, Barnett, like most kids brought up as wards of the court, lost government support on his 18th birthday.

Coming of age for Barnett and others such as him can prove to be a harsh rite of passage. Each year, more than 1,100 state wards like Barnett grow out of the system--and receive a sudden, chilly dose of reality, often followed by a descent into homelessness and crime.

Barnett said he had imagined himself “pushing a shopping cart” when his days in the foster system ended. Instead, he’s settled uneasily into one of a handful of housing allowances in Los Angeles County for former foster kids--the Independent Living Program apartments at Rancho San Antonio in Chatsworth.

Rancho’s Independent Living apartments were built this year with $172,000 raised from private sources. When complete, the program will provide an educational building and beds for two dozen young men. Eight live there now, including Barnett and friends Jason Robbins and Doug Hamm, both 18.

Barnett, Robbins and Hamm dwell in a world of $400 cars, dirty dishes, video games and endless pursuit of jobs that pay more than minimum wage. Their lifestyles are a little like those of freshmen in a college dorm--but without the college and the home and family to flee to on weekends.

At a time when many twentysomethings are moving back in with parents, some say it’s unrealistic to expect kids from troubled homes to make it at 18.

“If no one else is doing it, why should they?” asked Janet Knipe, who helps train foster youths for independence in Contra Costa County.

Barnett, whose last arrest was for assaulting a police officer, has drawn some of the same conclusions.

“The only thing that makes enough money to let you do what you want when you want is crime,” he said, dandling a cigarette outside his apartment one evening.

“There is nothing for people like us to do, really. I haven’t even graduated from the ninth grade, and there’s no way I’m going back to school, no way I can handle going to college. . . .” he said.

Even so, Barnett is one of the lucky few, claiming one of only about 30 beds in the county for youth newly released from foster care.

Rancho San Antonio is an institutional home for younger boys referred by the courts. It is owned by the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese and run by the Brothers of Holy Cross and is one among a small group of new programs that are, in effect, pushing the age of independence for the state’s dependent children closer to 21.

In recent months, the county Department of Children’s Services, using federal funds, has opened apartments for six former foster children and is in the process of renovating a house with nine beds, both in West Los Angeles, said Sharyn Logan, deputy director of the DCS’s Independent Living Program. Foster Youth Connection, a nonprofit group formed by some former foster children, has also opened a house near USC for about 10 youths and plans to collaborate with a South-Central group to open low-cost apartments for 34 next year.

“We’ve started looking at an entire generation of kids who grew up in the foster-care system and we are not necessarily really thrilled with what we are seeing,” said Sheila Anderson, assistant executive director of Bienvenidos, one of several nonprofit organizations that has applied for grants for independent living units.

Children’s services officials are also working with the county’s dependency court to make the legal process of release from foster care more contingent on whether the child has been prepared and has a place to go, said Peter Digre, director of the department.

“It is really hard to jump-start your life in this economy at 18,” Digre said. “There is no margin for error.”

Two-thirds of youths leaving the county foster-care system have no parents or relatives they could move in with, according to research conducted at UCLA in the late ‘80s. According to a national study, one in four such youths reported that, within the first four years of release, they had spent at least one night without a place to live.

For youths such as Barnett, whose blond hair tends to fall over his face as he talks, the choice between crime and work is serious and immediate. He talks coolly about past offenses, some violent. He said he gave up crime because he found that lifestyle “immature.”

“I don’t have a conscience. I’m not afraid of much,” he said.

Hamm, a more recent arrival, recently quit his job sinking fence posts. Reticent and aloof, he looks down when talking and prefers to listen from the sidelines, perched on his bike or smoking a cigarette.

Like Barnett, he chafes at the ground rules Rancho enforces.

The residents must look for work. They can’t smoke inside. Drugs and alcohol are forbidden. They can’t come in late. They must save a certain percentage of their income. And they must avoid running afoul of their roommates, even those Hamm calls “snitches.”

Robbins has spent months at a time in juvenile detention for burglary and for more violent crimes, he said. A husky, athletic youth who rarely smiles, Robbins remembers no life out of the foster-care system. He parted with his parents at age 3; his mother lives in Ireland and he has no contact with her, he said.

The Rancho administrators, he said, “think it’s totally easy to get a job,” he said. “But to get a decent job, a job that pays at least $5 per hour, it’s harder than they think.”

Robbins is the only one of the three to have earned a high school diploma. So far, he said, it’s made little difference. He fills out applications, he turns them in, he waits, but no one ever calls him back, he said.

“No one wants to hire me, I don’t know why not,” he said. People “see this big guy, they see the tattoos, they think I’m something else than I am.

“Instead of looking around, being rejected for everything, I could go out and steal a car, sell drugs or whatever. . . . It’s easier.” Asked why he doesn’t, Robbins shrugged. “I guess I just don’t want to get in trouble. It’s the easy way out.”

For all three, Rancho’s apartments offer both a safe berth and a first chance at freedom. Mark Grafitti, program coordinator, says it’s a precarious and sometimes tense balance.

“We struggle back and forth between monitoring the program and giving them the independence they need to make mistakes,” Grafitti said. “We are doing them a disservice if we are constantly over there and on them. . . . To a certain degree we have to leave them alone, but inherent in that is that you’re asking for trouble.”

In the four months since tenants moved in, two have been evicted. Rancho staff make it clear to tenants that this is their last stop. “We are very patient, but it gets to the point that it’s just ridiculous,” Grafitti said.

Barnett, Robbins and Hamm are making stabs at independence. Barnett held a full-time job as a waiter until he apparently lost it this week. Hamm had an interview at a gas station, but considered skipping it because all he had to wear were baggy pants. Robbins dutifully embarked on his job search one recent morning only to discover that his gas tank was empty and he had no cash.

Even the fundamentals of their lives are fraught with difficulty.

All three complain of never having good meals. Robbins has a wisdom tooth that must come out. It hurts, he said, but he has neither the money nor the necessary insurance paperwork to get it pulled.

“Turning 18 is like the hardest thing for a teen-ager,” Barnett said, as Hamm sat nearby, nodding. “That’s when it just slams you. No one wants to help you anymore when you’re 18.”

Robbins takes a longer view.

“If I had everything I wanted, I would move to Pasadena or Glendale, somewhere around that area,” he said. “I’d live in a decent apartment, and I’d have a good-paying job, working days, maybe working with kids.

“I want to go back to school. I want to have kids eventually. I don’t want to be rich, because I don’t want my kids to be spoiled. But I don’t want them to be, you know, like me, either.”