Probation Officials See Urgent Need for a New Juvenile Hall : Youth: The inmate population is rising with the increase in gang violence, creating severe crowding. Supervisors may balk at spending the estimated $20 million needed.

Warning that Ventura County’s Juvenile Hall population will swell far beyond the 114% growth it has seen since 1985, probation officials say they will beg the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday for a new juvenile jail.

And they say they will ask for more money to support non-jail programs for young offenders such as day treatment, electronic monitoring and boot camps.

“Ventura County’s juvenile facilities are in crisis,” declares a report assembled for the supervisors last week by probation officers in the county Corrections Services Agency.

Juvenile Hall “is a potentially dangerous liability, plagued by chronic overcrowding exacerbated by a population increasingly involved in serious, violent, gang-related criminal behavior,” the study says.

Designed for only 84 pretrial detainees, Juvenile Hall now holds a daily average of 105.9 youths, the report says. That number far outweighs the average daily population of 49.4 logged in 1985.

And Juvenile Hall’s average daily population is expected to reach almost 140 by the year 2000, the study says.

Corrections officers are working harder to separate the rising number of warring gang members behind bars there. On one representative day--March 13--nearly 60% of the 132 inmates admitted gang membership, the study says.

“We’ve done everything we can to keep the population down,” said Calvin Remington, deputy director of the Probation Department.

“But we’ve made a commitment that if it’s a violent offense . . . we’re going to book those kids,” he said. “And I don’t see any real way out of this.”

Waiting lists are growing, too, for education and counseling programs at the county’s other two live-in juvenile facilities--the Colston Youth Center and Juvenile Restitution Program.

That, said Juvenile Court Judge Steven Z. Perren, forces him to send more youths to expensive out-of-county programs. Or he must place them in foster homes or group homes instead of placing them in local programs close to their own homes.

“What it means is that kids are not getting into programs as soon as they might,” Perren said. “I think the system, if it’s not reacted to, is going to be in a crisis, that’s for certain. We have to take action now.”

Youths being released from Juvenile Hall now seem more hardened by the experience than they were a few years ago, said Kathy Marrujo-Thurman, youth services manager for El Concilio del Condado.

Corrections officers are put “in a real awkward situation” when they must try to keep first-timers and repeat offenders separated in the overcrowded hall, she said.

“The first-time offender gets mixed up with the real hard-core in there, and he walks out of there hard-core,” said Marrujo-Thurman, who oversees gang-intervention programs for the Latino social-services agency. “And a lot of parents complain about that.”

Remington warned that the supervisors may balk at immediately approving the estimated $20-million cost for the justice center--a combination of courtrooms, probation offices and 42 holding cells.

But sooner or later, Remington said, the officials must face facts. The number of juvenile delinquents in Ventura County will keep growing, and the most violent of them must be locked up somewhere before trial.

Juvenile Hall’s growth spurt is in part matching that of the county: It is largely driven by a 6.6% overall jump in the population since 1990, the report says.

Among seven similar-size counties, Ventura has the lowest number of juvenile hall beds and the worst overcrowding, the study says.

In Ventura County in 1983, there were 714 youths aged 13 to 17 for each Juvenile Hall bed. The number was 423 per bed in Kern County, 357 in Santa Barbara County and 286 per bed in San Francisco County, the study says.

And that year, the Ventura County Juvenile Hall was overcrowded on 100 days. Santa Barbara County’s facility was over capacity on 60 days, San Francisco’s on 51 days and Kern County’s on only two days.

But simply building more beds is not the complete solution, say Remington and Judge Perren.

“The Juvenile Hall problem is a problem that reflects the beginning of the funnel,” Perren said.

The shortage of alternatives to jail is even more pressing, he said.

Perren and Remington said they plan to ask the board to consider paying for alternatives, including electronic ankle bracelets to keep tabs on youths living at home while on probation, a day program to arrange counseling, education and community service work to youths having chronic trouble with school and boot camps.

One boot camp plan--if the county can secure federal funding--would send 20 youths to a Los Padres National Forest camp run by the Santa Barbara County Probation Department.

Another could provide boot camp beds for up to 110 juveniles in a barracks at the Camarillo Airport now used by adults in the sheriff’s work-furlough program.

But that proposal would depend on the Sheriff’s Department’s going through with a plan it has only begun to study. Under that plan, the Probation Department’s work-furlough inmates would be transferred to the new Todd Road Jail, and juvenile detainees could be sentenced to a boot camp at the airport, Remington said. The California Youth Authority must approve the plan for it to become effective.

“We need more alternatives,” he said. “The public, they’re fed up with gang activity, they’re fed up with juvenile violence, they’re fed up with drive-by shootings. And the message we’re getting from them is we [ought] to provide more structure and control for these serious kids. And it costs money.”

Remington admitted that it will be hard to ask the board for extra money in such lean times.

“But on the other hand, we are spending more money in a variety of ways,” he said. “The overtime in Juvenile Hall is tremendous.”

The county now spends more than $10,000 a month on overtime to keep Juvenile Hall staff levels high enough for the rising population, he said.

Placing one youth in an out-of-county education or probation program costs an average of $3,300 a month, Remington said.

“Those are very expensive,” he said. “We need alternatives.”

El Concilio’s Marrujo-Thurman agreed. But she said a new Juvenile Hall must be built to relieve pressure on youths who now are doubled up in cells or deprived of recreation due to crowding.

“When you’re locked up in a room and you just come out for meals and a few minutes in the yard, your surroundings make a whole lot of difference,” she said.

“A kid has a lot to think about when he’s sitting in a small cell, and it’s difficult especially if he’s sleeping on the floor or he’s doubled up and doesn’t have room to think.”

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Juvenile Overcrowding

Ventura County Juvenile Hall, with space for only 84 inmates, is growing increasingly overcrowded. The following shows how many inmates were held there on an average day in the March during four specific years: 1985: 46.5 1990: 97.4 1994: 96.2 1995: 119.0 2000*: 139.5 * Projected