Camp Crackdown

No one said it would be fun, rising at 6 every morning, saluting the flag half an hour later and sitting in silence while you and 99 other girls hastily scarf down breakfast before morning formations or before you hunker down at a desk and grapple with the school subjects that bored you on the outside. (Remember, since you can’t talk at meals, rap twice on the table if you want the water passed in your direction; three times for salt and pepper.)

This is jail, after all--and a military-style boot camp at that--not a cruise ship. Instead of air conditioners, there are swamp coolers in the barracks. You live and sleep in four units that veer out from a central command post. You share common bathing areas, communal toilets. You change clothes alongside everyone else. You are very close together, all the time. The people who run Camp Joseph Scott keep talking about teamwork, about collaboration and cooperation. This is not a good place to be enemies.

Several months ago, before she was arrested for possession of rock cocaine, Ivonne, 16, got into a fight with a rival gang member in East Los Angeles. Ivonne was stabbed 15 times, leaving her with scars that make her midriff look like a dartboard. Now her cot is maybe 50 feet from Nadia, the girl who stabbed her.

“I have some self-control, like I think, this girl is here, there’s nothing you can do about it, and you just got to obey these people here who are telling you what to do,” Ivonne says, sitting on her cot for a required respite of “rest or meditation.” “That’s kind of hard. I hardly listen to my mom, and now I got to listen to them?

“When I think about her”--Ivonne gazes in Nadia’s direction--”I think, someday I’ll get her. Someday I’ll catch her sleeping.”

Nadia, far tougher than she is tall, sounds impressed when she learns the extent of Ivonne’s injuries. “Fifteen times? I didn’t know I stabbed her that much.” Nadia first stabbed another girl three years ago, when she was 14. She used a screwdriver then but later switched to a pocket knife. “Stabbing someone, when I’m doing it, I feel a lot of anger. And then it feels good, because I know I’m doing something with that anger.” Nadia’s brother died at 15 in a gang shooting. Her father succumbed to a drug overdose in 1990. Her mother works in a factory. Everyone Nadia knows is in a gang. From jail, she corresponds with her gang, as if she were away on a little vacation.

“I like my life on the streets, even though it’s hard,” Nadia says. “And I know one thing. I don’t want to get old.”

Just outside the fence at Camp Scott, a sign warns, “Cuidad con las Viboras: Beware of the snakes.” Remote, and heavy with the scent of dry earth, the dusty terrain here in the Santa Clarita Valley is covered with vines, low brush and trees that droop to form bridal canopies over sun-baked clearings. It is reptile heaven.

It is also home to an unusual approach to this country’s growing problem of female juvenile delinquency. About a year and a half ago, Camp Scott was quietly transformed into a military-style boot camp for girl offenders, one of only a handful around the country. On any hot afternoon--and afternoons are almost always hot in the easternmost quadrant of Los Angeles County--this means squadrons of girls in combat boots and khaki uniforms are out on a concrete exercise field, marching in strict drill formation. Their hair is pulled back in tight knots or cropped to the female equivalent of a crew cut. Their eyes are straight ahead, and if they don’t want their entire company to earn demerits, their faces had better be expressionless. One misstep and they drop to the ground for 150 push-ups.

Commissioner James Ballew, a judge with the L.A. Superior Court in Pomona, was one of those who “yelled very loud” in the spring of 1994 to turn the 40-plus-year-old work camp into a rigidly disciplined facility for girls. Sentencing discretion--deciding where a youthful violator is jailed or what level of punishment he or she receives--rests with juvenile judges, and Ballew and others simply had too few places to send the girls who were showing up in their courtrooms with growing frequency, and for increasingly serious offenses.

“I was one of the many who kept moaning about no place to send the girls,” Ballew says. The 5- to 7-year-old trend of girls carrying and using concealed weapons, committing severe property crimes and honing their skills at crimes involving bodily injury was more than just disturbing, in Ballew’s view: “To me, it’s outright frightening.”

Boot camps mushroomed for adult offenders during the late 1980s. Adaptation of the concept for juveniles lagged because of questions about their appropriateness for young people--and many of these questions remain unanswered. But as frustration with rising juvenile delinquency grew among the public and within the juvenile justice system itself, the spartan strategy of the boot camp began to be applied to boys at a scattering of facilities. Extending this rigorous doctrine to girls was “one of those trendy things,” says Camp Scott Director Cristina Diaz. With seed money from a federal grant, the girls’ boot camp was launched as a pilot program. It will be officially dedicated in several weeks, nearly two years after it began.

A similar but much smaller boot camp opened for juvenile girls in Polk County, Fla., not far from Tampa, a year ago. The 20 beds set aside for girls are constantly filled in a high-security facility where sentences average 120 days. While contending that the entire program is too young to evaluate, Capt. Danny Drew has praise for one aspect of the regimen.

“We don’t let the juveniles talk here,” Drew says. Most juvenile detention centers are cacophonous places where residents spend a great deal of time glorifying their own exploits. “At least we’re not further educating the criminals here,” he says.

At Camp Scott, officials say the high returnee rate--sometimes more than 50% of the population has been there before--reflects the overworked probation department. Girls also come back because so few other incarceration or rehabilitation options exist for young females.

But doubts continue about the efficacy of boot camp for boys or girls. In an essay in a book called “Crime” (Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1995), Rand Corp. criminal justice researcher Peter W. Greenwood says juvenile boot camps have risen to popularity, “apparently satisfying the need to be both humanitarian and tough.” But, Greenwood continues, “few if any corrections practitioners believe that strict discipline and harsh living conditions on their own will lead to lasting behavioral changes.” Learning to withstand peer pressure and to harness group spirit may enhance rehabilitation, Greenwood goes on, but without after-care and community-based programs, those benefits may be lost.

Even the U.S. Department of Justice’s own research arm, the National Institute of Justice, has challenged the military approach. “What appeared to be a promising prognosis for youths’ adjustment during the residential phase changed when they returned home,” a May study of three boot camps states. “Without the 24-hour surveillance and regimentation of boot camp, youths soon reverted to old behavior.” Again, after-care was stressed--and found to be woefully lacking.

An Increasing Curve of Seriousness

Instead of talking about boys, this Camp Scott foursome is discussing entrepreneurialism, albeit not the kind of capitalism the culture condones. On a sunny break between afternoon classes, 16-year-old Charlene, from Pasadena, says she sold marijuana from her own garden. Patricia, 16, had a profitable trade in Pacoima in rock cocaine. She also practiced carjacking. Angel, 15, was sent to Camp Scott from West Covina for grand theft auto. She also sold speed and PCP. At 15, Marta was a successful LSD merchant in Los Angeles.

Marta also stole a car and a car stereo, the crimes that finally sent her here. “I wanted to sell them for drugs, heroin,” Marta says. “That’s what I like to use most of all.”

Along with significant ventures in the drug trade, girls in recent years have turned increasingly to violence and to more serious crimes. They strike back: against each other; against enemies, real or imagined; against family members or other authorities who attempt to discipline them; against boys.

In outlook and in actions, this represents a shift. “Most of the time, in the past, you used to see girls who were runaways or maybe in for shoplifting,” says James Petty, an L.A. County probation supervisor who helps run Camp Scott (which is named after the late attorney and civic leader). “When I worked in Juvenile Hall in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, we didn’t even have a unit for girls, because, I’ll tell you, girls weren’t in that kind of trouble.”

Now, Petty says, the population at Camp Scott nearly always approaches its 100-girl capacity. Ages range from 12 to 18, averaging about 15. The camp is divided into four tracks, based on age, the severity of the crime and the level of sophistication a girl shows. Juvenile sentences are far shorter than adult confinements; most girls are sent to Camp Scott for six to nine months. The crimes that bring them here show an increasing curve of seriousness. For example, armed robbery--often with assault involved--is a common offense.

More so than in other parts of the country, gang crimes land many Southern California girls in jail. As a result, the jail is a museum of gang tattoo artistry: X marks between the fingers; teardrops beneath the eyes; three dots beside the earlobe, signifying “mi vida loca,” my crazy life; five dots in the same place, the gang symbol for “I don’t give a [expletive].” Other designs are more elaborate, though not necessarily correctly spelled. In the Camp Scott kitchen, a 16-year-old proudly displays the curlicue script that wraps around her neck, an inky dark tattoo necklace. She is unconcerned that her street name is written “WISPER.”

The Camp Scott Code

In an attempt to instill discipline in the out-of-control lives of delinquent girls, inmates are taught the code they are expected to follow the moment they arrive at Camp Scott: “I will not lie, steal or cheat--or tolerate others who do.” The theory, Petty says, is that the new standard will replace the less lofty law of the street. Criminals, Petty scoffs, “have no honor that I recognize. Period.”

Petty, a lean Vietnam veteran in military camouflage, explains that each new arrival begins as a private, “just as I did in the military.” Good behavior brings advancement through the ranks. Bad behavior is punished according to an escalating scale, culminating in a day or more in “the box,” a solitary confinement unit at another prison camp in Lancaster. Some girls make frequent trips to the box. Others avoid it entirely.

At Camp Scott, every minute is tightly structured, filled with work, exercise or classroom learning. No foul language is permitted, ever. After 6 a.m. wake-up, there is a bed, dress and fingernail check for all inmates. There is revelry and a flag salute. Everyone works at assigned jobs in the kitchen and the grounds, and works out in drill sessions right out of U.S. armed forces basic training. Even girls who are pregnant go through the repetitive series of exercises, remaining at the camp until their eighth month, when they transfer to a medical facility.

Meals are basic, served on metal trays and silent--an eerie sight in a dining hall packed with 100 normally garrulous adolescent girls. Rest periods are so regimented that girls must lie on their backs, perfectly still on metal cots that are later smoothed to a state of creaselessness. Pre-approved books or magazines are held directly in front of each girl’s face, just so. Eyes are not permitted to dart off the page, least of all at a neighbor.

Gang animosities persist within the camp, though officials downplay them. Fighting is generally swiftly broken up by the 35-member camp staff--and always sternly punished. Some girls comment on sexual tensions, saying a long look can easily be misread.

Even “head calls,” or bathroom breaks, are stringently orchestrated. An entire platoon of up to 25 girls gets just two minutes to use the semiprivate facilities. Each girl is issued six squares of toilet paper and a slender chip of soap. Towels are folded in thirds and carried on the left shoulder.

Along with many of their superiors in the County Sheriff’s Department, Petty and Diaz hail the strict atmosphere at Camp Scott as an important step toward rehabilitation. “One of the important things is that here, they work toward something every day,” Diaz says. Some girls strive to advance their rank at camp. Others, like 17-year-old Jeanie, set academic goals. Waiting, as camp rules require, to speak until she was spoken to, Jeanie fairly crows to report that she recently passed her GED exam. Fifteen months earlier, she also relates, she brandished a .38-caliber weapon as she robbed a Los Angeles liquor store of $600.

Diaz also cites the value of working and living in platoons, where an individual misstep has ramifications for the entire group. “They develop a sense of community in the time they are here, even though this may be an artificial community,” she says. “They know that whatever one person does affects the rest. We hope this is a lesson they take with them. We try awfully hard to make analogies to what the outside world is like.”

‘My Mom, She Just Threw Us Out’

Consider what the outside world means to a girl like Carla, 17. Soon after her dad was sent to prison, Carla’s mother took up with a new boyfriend, who wanted no part of Carla or her sister. “My mom, she just threw us out,” Carla says, way too matter-of-factly. When her dad got out of jail, he learned about his wife’s boyfriend. He abandoned the whole family right then and there. Instead of her own family, “the people in my gang, they help me more than my parents.”

At home in East L.A., Carla says she seldom ventures out without some kind of protection, usually a knife or a screwdriver. When she leaves Camp Scott when her term for robbery is finished, in three to five months, Carla reckons she’ll go right back to her gang and her drugs.

For five years now, Cecilia, 17, has belonged to a gang in another part of Los Angeles. The gang has always been the biggest part of her life. Even inside Camp Scott, Cecilia says “there’s lots of gang activity here. Of course there is.”

This is Cecilia’s third “tour” at Camp Scott. First she was sent here for robbery, then for probation violation and, most recently, for possession of crack. With such a record, “a lot of the staff, they just think I’m a little thug,” Cecilia says.

Nothing much has helped to straighten Cecilia out until now. “The [juvenile] halls, they’re just like baby-sitting you in there,” she sneers. Past stays at Camp Scott had little effect either. But in the last four months, three of Cecilia’s “homeboys,” members of her gang, have been killed. One was only 10 years old. And all of a sudden, Cecilia says, she is beginning to worry about the junior members of her gang.

“Those young girls now, they don’t care. They start to have sex, and they don’t care who with,” Cecilia says. “They just care about fun.”

Cecilia has begun to dislike the gang tattoos on her face. With teardrops below her eye and a triangle beside her ear, she can’t get a job anywhere. Employers, especially those in fast-food places where a girl with no high school diploma might otherwise find work, fear reprisals from enemy gangs.

“I could be, like, honor roll, and these tattoos, that’s all they’d see,” Cecilia says. “I want them gone.”

For the first time, she says she’s beginning to take prison seriously. She hates Camp Scott, but recognizes that another serious offense might land her in an adult facility. She says she hopes things will be different when she gets out this time.

“But once I get out, I’ll start getting those phone calls. People telling me to come to parties, have some fun.” Cecilia stares straight ahead, idly folding and refolding a tiny strip of paper.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I just don’t know.”