Plan Urged to Cut Youths’ Crime Cycle : Juvenile justice: Social service officials will ask the Board of Supervisors to invest in a broad, ambitious post-release counseling program.

Busted again, Arturo and Eddie are back inside Ventura County’s Colston Youth Center, locked up for committing gang crimes.

Arturo says he ripped off car stereos, while Eddie admits smashing windows to intimidate a witness in his brother’s murder trial.

Valerie and Roger are back inside Colston too, unable to stay off drugs and out of trouble that violated their probation, they say.

The four teen-agers--here identified only by first names because of their age--say they want to go straight, get jobs and stay free.

But the little guidance they get from adults in the Ventura County juvenile justice system is no match for the temptation of drink, drugs and crime, they say.

“Every time I’m out, when I’m drunk or under the influence, I want to do crimes,” said Arturo, a slight 17-year-old who claims membership in Oxnard’s La Colonia gang.

“You say you’re going to do good now because you’re in here, but when you get back out, it’s the real world.”

Ventura County social service officials are working on a plan to break this pattern.

Next week, officials plan to ask the Board of Supervisors to invest in a broad, ambitious post-release counseling program meant to keep young lawbreakers from committing crimes again.

Now guided only by weekly visits from probation officers and biweekly counseling sessions, some teen-agers just keep committing crimes, getting arrested and cycling through county juvenile facilities, officials said.

“Once they get out of Colston, they’re slipping and in some cases falling and reoffending--quite often within 120 days,” said Frank Woodson, director of probation for Ventura County.

“What we want to do is focus on the needs of kids and their families as they’re released from the facilities.”

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Most young scofflaws toe the line after getting slapped with probation, community service or time at Colston, said Calvin Remington, Woodson’s court division manager at the county Corrections Services Agency.

But of about 2,000 youths the agency incarcerates each year, “There are somewhere around 8% who are habitual offenders and create a disproportionate amount of all crime,” Remington said.

“The real hope . . . is to be able to identify those kids early, before they’re in and out of our institutions,” he said. “If we can do more with them at 12 years of age, maybe we’ll do less with them further down the road.”

The program, still in the planning stages, is meant to surround young offenders on all sides--at school, at home and on the street.

Proponents of the plan believe that if they can keep these teen-agers out of trouble for six months, they will continue to behave and eventually find work and a place in society, said Randall Feltman, the county’s director of mental health.

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But the officials are under no delusions about what the program can achieve, Feltman said.

“We’re not going to close Juvenile Hall and Colston,” he said. “But if we can reduce the rate of recidivism for those 300 kids, we’ve concentrated on the most high-risk-to-arrest kids in the county, and if we get that (rate) down to 20%, that’d be a substantial change in the frequency of crime for the community.”

Social workers in the program would draw up a risk profile for each youth, then lay out a treatment plan sealed by a court-enforced contract with the youth and his or her family, Woodson said.

Youths still would get counseling from social workers and legal guidance from their probation officers as they do now.

But in addition, counselors could push them and their parents to try to sort out family problems that may be aggravating their delinquency, said Don Kingdon, director of family services for the county Department of Mental Health.

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The department also might work with the county Department of Education to put day treatment programs at schools, where the youths could go for counseling after classes, he said.

Most young offenders--an estimated 80%--also drink or use drugs, compounding their problems, officials said.

These would be required to meet with drug and alcohol treatment counselors and perhaps attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, they said.

“If the kid is having present problems with alcohol and drugs, the likelihood that they’re going to be doing any type of counseling is going to be absolutely nil,” said Stephen Kaplan, director of substance abuse programs for the county Health Care Agency.

“If you’re using, you’re not there (mentally),” Kaplan said. “You have to work with the kids to get them sober and clear their thinking and get them grounded in what’s going on. Once you’ve done that--and it’s obviously more easily said than done--you can look at the other issues.”

Youths in the program will still be tested at random for drug and alcohol use--as they are now --in a bid to enforce their sobriety, he said.

Some 16- to 18-year-olds who have dropped out or been expelled from school may also get vocational training to learn auto repair, welding or other skills that could lead to jobs, Woodson said.

Yet the program faces a hefty roadblock: Funding.

The county received $1 million in Social Security Act grants in the past year for youth programs, but it is also facing one of its harshest budget scenarios yet, Woodson said.

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Already facing a $16-million budget deficit, the Board of Supervisors may have to slash its health care programs if the Legislature approves Gov. Pete Wilson’s latest spending plan.

Woodson said he wants the board to put the grant money into a trust fund to feed the program, which ultimately could save the county money if it succeeds in cutting the juvenile recidivism rate.

Money also could be saved if young offenders can be kept together with families rather than be put into out-of-county placement homes that cost Ventura County $3,500 monthly or more per youth, said Kingdon.

Also in question, however, is how well any of this will work.

Colston was designed to treat teen-age offenders for emotional or substance abuse problems, but “now it has more to do with kids who are just much more criminally inclined,” Deputy Dist. Atty. John Cardoza said. “There are some kids who are much more predisposed to being treated, and some who are more resistant.”

“But if there’s anything helpful, you’ve got to make that effort,” added Cardoza, who oversees juvenile cases for the district attorney’s office. “There are some kids who it’d surprise me that anything would help. There are some in whom the ingrained behavior has been going on for such a long period of time, but you’re pretty sanguine about miracles occurring. You just can’t know until things are implemented.”

Without intensive guidance such as this, many newly freed juvenile offenders will keep going back to old friends and old ways, said Juvenile Court Judge Steven Z. Perren, who is also working on the program.

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“You can’t expect to bring a kid from an environment like that, treat him on the short term and then return him to the environment again and expect better behavior out of him,” Perren said.

“The hope is that with cooperative efforts between all the case managers, the courts, the drugs and alcohol program, the county services providers and the public that we can reduce these behaviors.”

Any treatment increase will help, said Kim Sheen, a senior deputy probation officer at Colston.

“It makes sense in the long run,” she said last week. “We’re wasting a lot of money when we try to plug the holes. The kids go home and we react to their negative behavior instead of reinforcing the positives.”

Eddie, 17, says he will need all the help he can get to stay away from booze and gang crimes when he gets out Sept. 21.

Last time he got out, he violated probation by drinking and hanging out with his Fillmore gang just days after his counseling ended, he says.

This time, he wants to find a job and stay straight. He knows if he is arrested again as an adult, he will go to jail.

And Valerie, 17, says that sitting in Narcotics Anonymous meetings and listening to others’ tales of drug use only makes her want to use more.

Only intensive drug counseling will keep her off rock cocaine when she gets out, she said.

“It’s encouraging--they have all these plans for you when you get out,” Valerie said. Then she added, “I don’t think I’ll use rock anymore, but I don’t know about the other stuff.”