Officials Plan to Enlist Young Offenders in Boot Camp

Faced with continuing overcrowding at Juvenile Hall and spiraling lockup costs, Ventura County supervisors agreed Tuesday to buy into a regional boot camp designed to rehabilitate young offenders through military-style regimentation.

Ventura County will spend $211,000 to help build a new dormitory at the Los Prietos Boys Camp, a 28-acre camp for wayward children run by Santa Barbara County probation officials.

The boot camp would supplement the existing Los Prietos program, with half of the 40 new beds to be occupied by Ventura County youths.

But unlike the current boys camp, the new facility would target young, nonviolent delinquents who officials think could avoid being caught in a life of permanent criminality.

Frank Woodson, director of the Ventura County Corrections Services Agency, said the boot camp could save as much as $400,000 a year--money that would otherwise be spent on longer-term incarcerations that cost the county $32,000 a year per child.

“There are some kids that don’t need so intense a program, and they can use a boot camp-style program that is much cheaper,” Woodson said. “It would be $6,000 to $9,000 a year versus $32,000 a year.”

Most of the $1.1 million needed to construct the boot camp, which would house children from San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties when it opens next September, came from a federal grant. Each county was required to contribute matching funds.

The Los Prietos Boys Camp currently houses 56 violence-prone delinquents on its rolling Los Padres National Forest property 30 miles north of Santa Barbara.

Craig Hamlin, the Santa Barbara County probation deputy chief who oversees the boys camp, said the proposed boot camp would operate on the same grounds, but that the two populations of teenagers would not mix.

“We will be dealing with the younger, nonviolent offenders in a very direct way,” Hamlin said. “If we are as successful as we hope to be, we’ll be able to turn those young offenders around very quickly.”

As planned, the younger offenders will rise at daybreak and don military fatigues. They will spend the next 16 hours doing marching drills, practicing cadence exercises and undergoing counseling. The average stay would be about three months per inmate.

“Our goal is to teach them responsibility through regimentation, education and through a lot of hard work and discipline,” Hamlin said.

Although the board unanimously approved spending the $211,000, Supervisor John K. Flynn said he worries whether a new boot camp will work.

Ventura County participated in a similar program in the 1960s and 1970s with little success, Flynn said. And rather than becoming rehabilitated, he said, young crooks returned to public schools more popular than ever.

“The county left that program, and I thought it was a flat-out failure,” he said. “After they went through the program, they wore the Los Prietos badge with defiance and they were looked up to by their peers.”

Flynn said he hopes some of the $400,000 or so in savings to Ventura County can be invested in community programs that prevent and deter violence and youth crime.

“Let’s start putting in money--more than we have before--into prevention,” he said. “Let’s try to get at those kids before they ever think about getting into trouble.”

Woodson, meanwhile, said money for such programs may be more widely available with the savings

“That’s one of the areas we haven’t done very much on, not only in Ventura County but in the state and the nation,” he said.

“We should invest in programs through the schools and the families to provide counseling, special education, a variety of things that are not being met in the normal environments,” he said. “There are kids out there we’re just not touching until they get into the juvenile justice system.”

The boot camp also will ease what has become a perennial overcrowding situation at the county Juvenile Hall, where 95 young people are now housed in a facility originally built to accommodate a maximum of 84 children.

The camp marks the second phase of an effort to reduce the population at Ventura’s Colston Youth Center. Moving 20 young offenders to the camp will create more room at the juvenile lockup.

County probation officials announced plans last summer to launch an early-release program for other nonviolent offenders.

Scores of young delinquents are being sent home and monitored electronically--a system that Woodson credits with reducing the Juvenile Hall population by 25% in the past few months.

“So far that electronic monitoring program is working very well,” Woodson said. “Kids seem to be responding to it. One kid even cut off his bracelet, but turned himself in a little while later.

“He’d even kept the bracelet.”