Expert Panel Probes Juvenile Justice System

Since she left the home of her alcoholic mother at the age of 7, Sarah Mitchell, 19, has bounced from a foster home to a group home to the “transitional living” home in Los Angeles in which she now resides.

Despite more than 12 years in the county’s much criticized juvenile system, she has never run afoul of the law and is now taking courses to become an electrician.

“The system has been both good and bad to me,” Mitchell told an attentive panel of juvenile experts in Van Nuys. “But for me, I wanted to be an example for my brother and a role model for my children someday.”

The panel of nearly 30 experts and state lawmakers was on hand Monday at Birmingham High School for a rare public hearing to discuss ways to increase the number of young people like Mitchell who come out of the juvenile system, and in the process reduce the number of teenage criminals.

But after hours of testimony from some of the state’s most noted experts on juvenile delinquency, there was still no clear solution, only suggestions on how to improve the current system.

Most experts agreed that local social services agencies must cooperate better and must intervene with families at the earliest sign that a child is going astray. They cited study after study indicating that children who get social services attention or mental health treatment once they run away or skip school are much less likely to end up before a criminal judge.

“The kids who get in trouble start out in crime early on in life, usually before 15 years of age,” said Michael Schumacher, the chief probation officer for Orange County and author of a noted study about juvenile delinquency.

Several speakers touted a 14-year-old Ventura County program that coordinates the efforts of mental health officials, probation officers, foster care representatives and educators to keep track of individual children within their care. It has been so successful, it has been replicated in 18 other counties.

But the challenge for lawmakers like Assembly members Robert Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) and Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley), who co-chaired the hearing, is finding the money to create similar programs in every county statewide and convincing other lawmakers to rethink existing juvenile justice strategies.

“The answer is usually to lock them up and that usually is the most expensive alternative and we really can’t do that anymore,” said Aroner. “But the resources are the issue.”

The joint hearing of Hertzberg’s Public Safety Committee and Aroner’s Human Services Committee attracted more than 150 people, including the students of several government classes from the high school.

Both Hertzberg and Aroner said they will face a tough fight convincing state lawmakers to rethink the “lock them up” mentality about juvenile justice that pervades Sacramento.

“The system is broken to the extent that we have a huge crime problem,” Hertzberg said. “All we can do as public servants is to try to reduce the cost and make it more effective.”

Hertzberg and several of the juvenile experts said that several studies have shown that providing early foster care or parenting classes for families with a truant or problem child is much less expensive than jailing the same child when he runs into serious trouble later in life.

“We believe that government doesn’t do a good job of raising children and that families, given the resources, raise children the best,” said Stephen Kaplan, the director of the Ventura County Behavior Health Department, who helped launch Ventura’s touted “Children’s System of Care” program.

But in Los Angeles, the efforts to improve the juvenile system are hampered by the sheer number of children.

This was noted by Judge Michael Nash, presiding judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court--the largest juvenile court system in the world with 50,000 children in its care.

“We have a massive system to deal with in Los Angeles,” he told the panel.

He said Los Angeles County has 20 dependency courts that each day hear 30 cases involving minors who suffer from neglect or abuse or are runaways or curfew violators.

Like many other speakers, Nash suggested the juvenile systems need better coordination among the various agencies to track the progress of children. He also called for more resources to cut down on the workload for Juvenile Court judges, social workers and probation officers.

“It’s a wonder that anyone gets any attention from any system, to be honest,” he said.