Tough Leader Earns Respect at Youth Prison

The California Youth Authority’s Ventura School locks up a younger, harder breed of juvenile delinquent than it did 20 years ago, when Vivian V. Crawford was the school’s psychologist.

But today, at 45, Crawford is wiser, more experienced and more powerful. Now she runs the place.

Named superintendent of the Camarillo-based juvenile prison 17 months ago, Crawford oversees more than 900 young murderers, assailants, robbers and thieves--almost a third of them female.

Rising sexual abuse, gang violence and poverty have made tougher criminals out of the youths sent there, Crawford said. Some, she added, have so many problems and are so stubbornly resistant to treatment that they are doomed to lives of crime.

But Crawford said: “We never give up.”

“Over the years,” she said, “I’ve found some of the ones you think were not going to make it have made it. And others, you put all kinds of resources into them, and they come back into the system.”

As a strong administrator and the first African American woman to run a youth authority institution, Crawford has won almost universal respect from employees and supervisors, who praise her as tough, attentive and fair.

And while some wards at the coeducational institution gripe that Crawford is overly serious and refuses to allow the regular boy-girl social events they once enjoyed, others praise her.

“I think she’s a great role model to us, especially because there are so many females in here that are minorities,” said Antanette Durr, 19, of Carmel Valley, who is serving time for murder.

Crawford has fought hard for the chance to earn that respect.

Born the eldest daughter of a tile-maker and a maid, she grew up in a poor family of seven children, living in the house her father built in segregated Palestine, Tex.

“I went to schools with all black folks, my neighborhood was all black folks--I didn’t really see other people except to go out to stores, or people that my parents dealt with in their jobs,” she said.

When she turned 15, the family moved to California. Crawford traded the calm Texas town for East Los Angeles, arriving on the scene just as the 1965 Watts riots were about to explode.

She also found herself trading concerned, demanding teachers for a sprawling metropolitan school system where many students encouraged mediocrity and many teachers were, at best, indifferent about her future.

“It was kind of a culture shock,” she said. “In Texas, just about everybody studied and tried to do well. It was just the opposite in Los Angeles.”

But in her senior year at Theodore Roosevelt High School, one teacher took note of Crawford’s grades and encouraged her to try for college.

Crawford was reluctant at first, but then she seized the opportunity and packed her final high school year with courses that would enable her to apply for college.

“I had to fight to take biology, I had to fight to take chemistry,” she recalled. “I had to fight my counselor.”

After earning her bachelor’s degree in sociology at UC Santa Barbara, she moved on to the graduate school to pursue a master’s degree in counseling psychology.

Crawford volunteered for a taste of her future life’s work with a semester-long internship counseling inmates at Lompoc Federal Prison Camp.

“I wish I had a picture of it,” she said. “I was this little, young person in a room with about eight to 10 cons.”

She admitted feeling a little lost at first. But she said her charges, whom she calls “gentlemen,” caused her no problems as she learned how to counsel them.

After earning her master’s degree, she studied an extra year to earn credentials as a school psychologist, and began applying for work. She signed on as a school psychologist for the California Youth Authority and started her work at the Youth Training School at Chino.

After several months, she moved to the Ventura School, and then to the Fred C. Nelles School in Whittier, where she worked on a training team that developed special programs at five CYA schools.

“I found it rewarding,” she said of her work counseling wards and training staff. “It’s a challenge, but when you see a positive change taking place, it is very rewarding.”

Wanting to have a stronger impact on the wards’ lives, she pursued an administrative career. She worked her way up from an administrative assistant’s post in Sacramento to a three-year stint overseeing educational programs back at the Ventura School.

In 1985, she further bolstered her skills at the CYA’s Preston School of Industry in Ione, overseeing programs for intensive treatment, counseling, substance abuse and forestry.

By the late 1980s, she was promoted to assistant superintendent, and then superintendent, of the 439-bed O.H. Close School in Stockton.

She then went to serve a two-year stretch as superintendent of the Southern Reception Center and Clinic in Norwalk, the gateway to the youth authority system for all young offenders. She returned to Ventura for a third time in February, 1993.

With an annual budget exceeding $27 million, a two-year college program, joint ventures with two private companies and the only female population in the CYA, the Ventura School is perhaps the most complex and demanding institution of its kind in the system.

“It’s not just purely a school,” she said. “You’ve got to run all of it.”

Since arriving, Crawford has made several moves to improve treatment and education for the female wards--not the least of which was eliminating a time limit on rape counseling.

“Before, you would go for six to eight weeks and then be cut off,” said Durr, who serves on the ward advisory committee. “They’d expect you to get over it in six to eight weeks and then get on with your life.”

Crawford also made more programs available to the young women. For instance, she doubled the TV and sound production class from two hours a week to four for female wards, who once had half the time male wards had in that class.

She expanded the Free Venture program that currently employs wards as telephone airline ticket agents for TWA, allowing a Port Hueneme firm to pay wards to sew together upholstery, wheel covers and awnings for recreational vehicles.

Crawford also set up a pre-parole life-skills class that begins 90 days before release so wards can learn the intricacies of job hunting, house hunting and home finance.

And she gave Eddie Cue, the school’s gang information coordinator, the go-ahead to give a taste of life on the inside to youths on the outside who are at risk of joining gangs.

So far, the program has sent 3,000 Ventura County youths through the facility to meet with young inmates, who warn them about the dangers of gang life.

“(Wards) will say, ‘I’ve never driven a car, I’ve never been to a prom, I’ve never been to a football game. It’s 10 years since I’ve eaten a McDonald’s hamburger.’ And these kids listen to this,” Cue said. “I put this request through the past three superintendents, and she said, ‘All right.’ ”

Crawford is a strong and fair administrator, said Allison Zajac, who has worked off and on with Crawford for nearly 15 years.

“She’s very thorough,” said Zajac, former assistant superintendent of the Ventura School and now superintendent of the O.H. Close School. “She’s going to be solid, and when she makes a decision, it is going to be well-researched, and she’ll also consider the personal impact and the human side of the decision.”

The union is also pleased with her, said Joe Turner, president of the local chapter of the Correctional Peace Officers Assn.

“She’s doing a pretty good job,” Turner said last week. “She keeps the lines of communication open. She has a real professionalism that basically the administration and the union both stand for.”

The union is negotiating for more money to spend on counseling the wards, hoping to increase the time from three hours a week to 16 hours a week, Turner said.

Chris McCarthy, 21, a member of the Ward Advisory Committee, who is serving time for murder, said Crawford is more receptive than her predecessor, Manuel Carbajal.

“She’s more open-minded and more willing to talk to us,” she said. “Her office door’s open if we need to talk to her. . . . She’ll hear us out, even if she doesn’t approve.”

Crawford said she has not been persuaded yet to give in to one demand--that the school reinstitute co-ed dances that were halted several years ago after several wards got pregnant.

In fact, she is weighing the possibility of segregating more of the mostly co-ed classes by sex to make the interactions between males and females easier to manage. One hang-up is finding money to support the extra teaching time that would be needed.

“It’s a chore to supervise a co-ed situation, especially when they are the groups we’re dealing with and the hormones are raging,” she said.

Crawford, who is single, devotes long hours to her job, say co-workers. Though she has never married, she may in the future.

She does have a large extended family, including her late brother’s three children, whom she is helping to put through private school.

And despite the long hours, she finds time to travel to places such as China and Africa and to spend time with her relatives.

Crawford’s greatest frustration, she said, is “the time that it takes to affect change.”

“It’s just that when you’re dealing with people, it takes a while for everybody to get on board and understand that you need to get people to the point where they’re trusting your decisions.”