Space Sought for Juvenile Lawbreakers

With more and more young criminals jamming the local justice system, county officials are mulling whether to cut back a successful work furlough program to make room for juvenile offenders.

A vacant building at the work furlough site in Camarillo could be converted within a year to house 40 to 50 teens at a cost of $700,000 to $800,000, preliminary estimates show.

That could help relieve the severe overcrowding at the county’s Juvenile Hall and other facilities for young criminals.

“It’s the sort of interim solution that we can potentially get up and running fairly quickly,” said Cal Remington, who heads the county’s Probation Department.

But it could cut the ranks of the respected work furlough program, which now allows 200 adult nonviolent criminals to go to work while serving jail sentences. The program could handle only about 140 people, because staff would have to be diverted to deal with youths.

The other 60 adults would serve their sentences in jail. But officials said the change would only affect those individuals who do not have jobs and spend their time at work furlough going through county drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs.

Members of the county’s Justice Policy Council--including county supervisors, judges, public defenders, prosecutors and probation officers--have discussed the proposal and are awaiting a feasibility study.

That study also will look at whether the building could be brought up to state standards for juvenile jails.

But even that extra space, members acknowledge, wouldn’t solve the problem that an explosion of juvenile crime has created.

“This is probably the No. 1 issue to face us right now,” said Ventura County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Bob Brooks, who is the only candidate running to replace retiring Sheriff Larry Carpenter.

“What everyone is in agreement on is that we need a new juvenile justice complex,” said Brooks, who also serves on the committee. “But even if we were ready today with the financing, it could be another 10 years before it can be built. We need to create some interim space.”

The county’s Juvenile Hall has been overcrowded for more than a decade, and predictions are that the problem will only worsen as the number of juvenile offenders continues to rise.

Officials estimate that more than 2,000 youngsters, some of them repeat offenders, will go through the county’s Juvenile Hall this year.

But it could cost $23 million and take another 10 years before a new Juvenile Justice Center could be built that would handle the growing number of young offenders.

“Knowing how crowded it is in there, you’d be a darn fool not to realize that we need to do something,” said Supervisor Judy Mikels, who sits on the committee studying the overcrowding problem.

One of the first things Mikels did after she was elected to office in 1994 was tour the county’s aging Juvenile Hall.

Built to house 84 youngsters, the facility consistently holds as many as 120 teenagers at a time.

“We’re just fortunate that we haven’t had a major incident. The longer we wait, the more pressure that builds up in there and the more risk we have for a major incident to occur.”

It’s not as if they did not see the situation coming.

As far back as 1982, corrections officials warned of a pending overcrowding crisis. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse.

The county managed to increase the number of beds available for juvenile offenders last fall when it joined with Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties to open the Tri-County Boot Camp in Santa Barbara County. The camp can take up to 20 Ventura County teenagers at a time.

Mikels wants to see the boot camp expanded. The camp, which has a four-month program that uses strict discipline to turn troubled youths around, is not big enough to meet the current demand, she said.

The county has also expanded other programs, including a system of electronic monitoring, that allows young teens convicted of nonviolent offenses to be sent home.

If an offender leaves home during his or her sentence, an electronic bracelet attached to the ankle alerts authorities.