Tightest Juvenile Hall in Nation Planned in Sylmar

The San Fernando Valley Juvenile Hall will become the largest and most jail-like county youth facility in the nation when a high-security wing for violent teen-agers is completed two years from now.

The $16-million project also propels the Sylmar facility into the midst of a national debate over whether incarceration or prevention is the best way to combat the growing numbers of violent youths.

“There isn’t anything in this country that is going to come close to L.A. when this facility is built,” said Earl Dunlap, executive director of the National Juvenile Detention Assn., which oversees the more than 400 county youth detention facilities in the country. “But,” he added, “they can’t build their way out of the problem.”

No one disputes the stark facts: Violent crime among youths is on the rise across the country, with children accused of murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery growing 68% from 1988 to 1992, according to a recent study by the U.S. Justice Department. In the city of Los Angeles, there was a slight decline last year, but the numbers remain astonishing: nearly 10,000 youths were arrested for violent offenses last year.

“We are meeting a need,” said Ed Anhalt, supervisor of the sprawling 453-bed San Fernando Valley Juvenile Hall, which for the past few years has struggled to accommodate an average of 620 young inmates at a time, about 50 of them considered violent.

“It is a statement on what is happening in the community: we have an increase in violent offenders,” Anhalt said.

Construction of the high-security wing at San Fernando, which began last month, is expected to be completed in 1996. When done, the wing will include two high-security buildings--containing 160 beds--equipped with a high-tech audio system for staff and visual monitors through which they can watch the youths’ movements.

Plans also call for an automatic gate and fence surrounding the facility and a more secure entryway for the hall, with a bulletproof room to protect staff from new inmates or visitors.

Like other county juvenile halls, San Fernando is a holding place for youths awaiting a judge’s sentence, which for the most serious offenders could mean a transfer to the California Youth Authority--the state’s youth prison system. But of the more than 26,000 young prisoners held at San Fernando Juvenile Hall every year, officials said only the hardest-core--those who have killed, raped, beaten or robbed, or are suicidal--will be placed in the high-security unit to prevent them from harming others or escaping.

During the past five years, Anhalt said, there have been two successful escapes from the Juvenile Hall, although in both cases the escapees were recaptured after three days.

Making the hall more secure is reasonable, conceded Dunlap of the national detention group, but county officials should strive to keep the environment less jail-like.

“That kind of massive security is fairly unusual,” he said. “They are just building a jail for kids. . . . Everybody says the problem in L.A. is different, but there are a lot of other jurisdictions in the country that are coming up with alternatives to lock-down.”

Taxpayers are paying the price for the hard-line approach to rising youth crime, Dunlap said. In Los Angeles, he estimated, it costs $45,000 to jail a juvenile for a year, compared to about $2,000 to put one youth through a year of intervention programs.

But across the nation, rising youth crime figures have provided fuel for the fight to take a tougher stance against criminal children, which in turn may increase the stress on the juvenile justice system.

State legislators have pitched more than a dozen bills that increase penalties for youths, most of which are still pending. Their suggestions range from establishing longer sentences for minors who commit violent crimes to trying youths as young as 14 as adults in murder cases.

Nationally, provisions to allow adult trials for suspects as young as 13 and to make gang membership a federal offense are part of the hotly debated crime measure by the Clinton Administration.

Many youth experts insist these get-tough efforts are not the best antidotes for a juvenile justice system already lagging in its response to the surge of violent offenders. They argue that the money would be better spent on rehabilitation and diversion programs that target at-risk youth.

“Locking up more people is not a solution to juvenile delinquency,” said John J. Wilson, acting administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which coordinates federal efforts with state and local programs. “Yes, we have to protect the public, but we should be putting the money into the front end--through prevention programs.”

The proportion of youths incarcerated for violent crimes in California grew from 44% of juvenile inmates in 1987 to 61% in 1992, California Youth Authority data shows.

In the city of Los Angeles, there was actually a slight decrease in the number of violent youths apprehended last year: 9,970 youths were arrested for violent crimes in 1993, down about 5% from the 10,477 kids arrested in 1988.

Experts say the local decrease may be the result of preventive Los Angeles city ordinances--including laws making it illegal to sell knives, blades or other stabbing weapons to anyone younger than 18, and a 10 p.m. street curfew for minors.

Nonetheless, local Juvenile Hall authorities say they remain in the midst of a serious housing crisis that needs to be addressed with beds, not words.

“We are severely limited in our space to accommodate them,” Anhalt said.

Juvenile Hall officials so wanted to build the high-security addition at the San Fernando complex that they lobbied for two years to get financing, finally successfully tapping into Proposition 86, a $500-million state bond issue designated for construction of juvenile halls and jails. The county provided 25% of the project’s cost.

The two other juvenile halls that serve Los Angeles County--Los Padrinos in Downey and Central in Los Angeles--have what are considered high-security units. But, like other halls across the country, their security measures are no match for what is planned at San Fernando, officials said.

Yet, it is only a lack of money--not a lack of support for the concept--preventing such upgrades from being made countywide, juvenile officials said. As a stopgap measure, officials at Central Juvenile Hall have strung barbed wire atop fences to prevent escapes, and they expect to install an audio system soon that would link staff throughout the facility.

“We don’t have the luxury of gates and bulletproof windows around here,” said Michael Edwards, assistant superintendent of Central Juvenile Hall. “Right now, our staff’s eyes and ears are our audio and visual equipment.”

Presently, Central Juvenile Hall is the largest juvenile detention facility in the country, with technically 565 beds, although 111 of them cannot be used because they are in buildings destroyed by the January earthquake.

The Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago currently is tied with San Fernando for second-largest juvenile facility in the country, with about 450 beds. Los Padrinos has 431 beds.

Experts on both sides of the debate about how to address youth violence agree that the recent nationwide increase in juvenile crime can be traced to a number of factors, including the availability of guns, the prevalence of gangs and societal factors such as a popular culture that glorifies violence, the loss of a sense of community and child abuse.

Experts also agree that the most successful programs are those that target youths while they are still in their own communities.

“They keep kids in the community--sometimes still detained (at a local juvenile hall) or at home--and offer programming (to get) them out of problems that they have there,” said Pam Allen, director of special projects for the Coalition for Juvenile Justice in Washington.

Allen stressed the importance of providing a support system for minors who have been incarcerated to help them make the transition back into society.

Greg Fitzgerald, director of Hope and Youth, said the very things that increase the crowding of the juvenile justice system--including the harsher penalties proposed by politicians--are really just a Band-Aid for much bigger problems. Hope and Youth works with at-risk children and teen-agers in the Los Angeles area.

“We are dealing with 11-, 12- or 13-year-olds,” Fitzgerald said. “We can either lock them up or have more community-based programs where we can work to find the root cause of these behaviors.”

Child abuse is one of the root causes for the rise in juvenile arrests, according to Wilson, with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Particularly among the most violent youths, he said, “if you look at the history of these children, you will find a surprisingly high percentage of them have been victims of abuse and neglect.”

Testifying recently about the treatment of juveniles in the criminal justice system to the House subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, Wilson said: “Building more juvenile halls may be necessary as a short-term approach, but you have to look at the big picture. We have to put money in places that will make the kids safe.

“If we don’t do that, all we will do in the foreseeable future will be to build more facilities.”