Youth Offenders Could Hit Street if Facility Closes

In the trenches of the war against street gangs, the proposed closure of a county facility for youthful offenders came as a wearying setback Wednesday to police and crime-fatigued residents who worried such an action would send teen criminals back to the streets more quickly.

“Our concern is if this facility is closed, what happens to these people? Do they go right back on the street?” asked Laurann Cook, a longtime Neighborhood Watch activist and member of the Fountain Valley City Council. “Cuts are fine. But what happens next? Who copes with the aftermath?”

The minimum-security Joplin Youth Center, in remote Trabuco Canyon, was included Tuesday in a broad range of proposed cutbacks aimed at balancing the county budget in the wake of Orange County’s unprecedented municipal bankruptcy Dec. 6.

Police in the county’s most gang-plagued communities complained that any cuts in the number of slots for young offenders made crime-fighting all the harder.

“It’s tough enough now to get these people booked on felonies,” said Sgt. Bob Clark, a spokesman for the Santa Ana Police Department. “It’s very frustrating. . . . They’re going to be right back on the street. I seriously doubt they’ll be rehabilitated.”

The Joplin camp was the only one of four youth facilities run by the county’s Probation Department tagged for possible shutdown.

County probation officials would not say Wednesday where else they would house up to 60 juvenile convicts now incarcerated at Joplin, which doubles as a school and detention camp for boys ages 13 to 17.

Youthful offenders spend up to six months in rehabilitation at the unfenced facility, taking individualized classes and receiving counseling and job training. The small size and rural setting set it apart from the county’s 374-bed Juvenile Hall and the state’s juvenile prison system, the California Youth Authority, reserved for the most hardened young criminals.

Among those at Joplin, the most serious offenses are likely to be auto theft and burglary.

But their crimes are “serious and violent offenses,” and more than four in five of those at Joplin are affiliated with gangs, according to the report outlining the cutbacks proposed by Orange County Chief Executive Officer William J. Popejoy.

“These individuals will (probably) be returned to the community,” the report said.

Police and some residents were nervous about that prospect.

“We can’t just recycle someone who has been involved in gang shootings and drugs,” said Westminster Police Chief James Cook.

Gang workers said the proposed closure would send the wrong message to young offenders who have been warned they will be punished for their misdeeds.

Ignacio Gutierrez, 27, an Anaheim gang intervention counselor, said counselors often tell teen-agers, “If you do the crime, you gotta do the time.”

Gutierrez said: “How successful will that be if we don’t have any place to put them?”

“We always try to teach the guys and the girls that there are ways to deal with problems and some want to deal with them the wrong way,” Gutierrez said. “And we tell them, you’re going to have to pay sooner or later, and with this (proposal) it sounds like it’s going to be later.”

But some neighborhood activists sounded a more philosophical note, pointing out that painful county budget cuts have to be shared by everyone.

Rita Corpin, a Santa Ana neighborhood leader, said she has witnessed the toll of the county’s bankruptcy in her job as a high school teacher. The classroom shortages are so acute, Corpin said, that she planned to ask parents during a school open house Wednesday night to donate classroom materials such as paper and markers.

“It’s easier on us if youthful offenders . . . are incarcerated. If they can be off the streets, that’s better,” Corpin said. “But it’s belt-tightening for all of us. They’ve got to cut somewhere.”

One expert said the youths housed at Joplin were among the least violent in the juvenile-justice system and did not pose a threat if released.

“The frightening prospects go to the (California) Youth Authority,” said Prof. Arnold Binder, who heads the UC Irvine criminology department and is an expert on juvenile delinquency.

“If there happens to be a serious offender, they can go back to court,” Binder said. “There’s not going to be any young murderers at Joplin. I don’t interpret that as a threat to the community.”

Binder worried that the closure might mean that some salvageable juvenile offenders would be sent instead to the California Youth Authority.

This is not the first time the Joplin center has been threatened with the budget ax. Two years ago, the county’s chief probation officer, Michael Schumacher, publicly warned that impending budget reductions would likely mean closing Joplin.

“I am in a position to appreciate the value of local juvenile camps in reforming wayward teen-agers,” Schumacher wrote at the time in an essay in The Times. “They are an important part of the juvenile justice system that is worth saving.”

The center was kept open.

Schumacher and other probation officials declined to comment Wednesday on the Joplin facility.

Whatever the center’s fate this time, the proposed closure suddenly has placed the out-of-the-way facility on the minds of residents who previously paid no attention to it.

For some, the connection was simple fear.

“I really would hate to see any of them (youth offenders) returned to the streets earlier than expected,” said Dorothy May Rush, an anti-gang activist elected to the La Habra City Council after her home was firebombed and pierced by bullets attributed to gang retaliation.

“And frankly, I wouldn’t want some to return to the street at all,” Rush said. “Every time they do, I get more air conditioning in my house, and I don’t need that anymore.”