Juvenile Court Gets a Home in High Desert

In the rugged High Desert of the Antelope Valley, it always has been easy to feel isolated from the rest of Los Angeles County, scores of miles and rock formations to the south.

Just ask a juvenile offender.

Historically, minors caught breaking the law there had to make a 60-mile trip to Sylmar to appear in one of the county’s 27 full-time juvenile courts. Sometimes they got sent even farther, to East Los Angeles.

Youths in dependency cases--typically involving crimes in their homes that resulted in their abuse, neglect or abandonment--had faced at least a two-hour ride to Monterey Park since 1992, when a $59.6-million dependency court building opened there to centralize such cases.

The North District, one of 12 regions in the county Superior Court system, had always provided some juvenile court services, but they remained part time and underfunded.

Beginning last month, though, 30 to 50 delinquency cases have been handled daily at a new full-time facility in the former sheriff’s station on West Avenue J in Lancaster. The renovations, including those to the dependency court, which opened last summer, cost Lancaster $1.6 million. Many predict the results will more than justify the expense.

“You’re dealing with an area that’s almost the size of Rhode Island, and there has been nothing,” said Richard Naranjo, juvenile deputy in the Antelope Valley branch of the district attorney’s office.

The valley has long had a “checkered history” of processing juvenile cases, said John Spillane, Naranjo’s boss in Lancaster. “It seems like many of our problems we are dealing with are connected to the juvenile system,” he said.

In recent years, FBI statistics have shown adult violent crime dropping nationwide. After a seven-year rise, juvenile violence also started declining in 1995, sliding 9.2% in 1996.

But the Antelope Valley has run counter to the national trend in an important area: hate crimes, which increased from 18 in 1995 to 40 in 1996, often involving teenagers. County authorities locate one of the county’s four “clusters” of hate crimes in the Antelope Valley.

Putting defendants through the justice system so far away hardly helped, said Superior Court Judge Frank Jackson, supervisor of the North District. “You had witnesses, defendants and attorneys driving all over Los Angeles County to take part in cases that should be tried here,” Jackson said.

The distance, he added, has prevented the juvenile system from fulfilling its true mission: understanding a young person’s circumstances and environment before making a final evaluation of the person’s crime.

The new court, presided over by Judge Chesley McKay, is also expected to ease the burden on law enforcement officers, who needed half a workday to deliver even the briefest court testimony.

“Everybody . . . is really happy to have it there in the community,” said Sylvia Wells, an assistant administrator of the county’s delinquency courts. “We always wanted to keep courts out there, but we didn’t have any money.”

Lancaster Assistant City Manager Dennis Davenport said: “We’re definitely pleased. Commuting over the hill is something people do for jobs. But when you’re talking about small children . . . this is a real benefit.”

The new setup will give authorities a chance to put young offenders on the right track before they clog the adult system, Naranjo said.

“We just need to get to them early enough, right here,” he said.