Corps Values

Harsh lights flashed on in the darkened bunkhouse as ex-Army drill instructor Bernard Carreira welcomed 40 sleeping teens to another day.

“Bunks!” Carreira thundered, starting a countdown guaranteed to yank his young wards from any dreams.

“Ten, nine, eight . . . “

A 17-year-old car thief from Ventura, R.E. was one of the first to scramble from his bed, already in a rotten mood.

He had had a plan to turn his life around, but it had fallen flat. He had learned the Marine Corps wouldn’t take him because he had asthma. That meant the closest he would ever come was this boot camp for young criminals.

The push-ups, the military drills, the in-your-face stuff before dawn, he could take all that. But the punishments for almost nothing--that was a different story. Boot camp stinks, he thought, scowling.

“Seven, six . . . ,” counted Carreira, a paunchy man in camouflage shorts and combat boots striding down the barracks as boys whirled around him.

As the countdown continued, a 16-year-old Oxnard gang member named Fernando struggled out from under his olive-green wool blanket.

He had been arrested a dozen times for using drugs. Fernando had done it all--meth, rock, pot--and his life was a mess.

He was impulsive: If a friend wanted to go on a beer run or get high, he would just do it. When Fernando’s mother got angry with him, he would move in with his dad. When his dad started to hit him, he would move in with friends or live on the streets. Fernando did whatever he wanted to do.

*

But not here. Not in this place.

“Five, four . . . ,” Carreira barked.

By now a 17-year-old gangbanger from Santa Paula named Jaime had braced himself at attention in front of his bed.

Jaime had been arrested 16 times, most recently when he and a friend tried to trade a gun for pot. The deal went sour and Jaime was busted for possession of a handgun.

He had never had much luck as a criminal.

“Three, two . . . Now don’t be late,” Carreira warned. Still crawling out of his bed, a 17-year-old heroin addict named Jess braced himself for another day of unrelenting reality.

He couldn’t do 10 push-ups when he got here a month earlier. At least he was a little stronger now. And at least it was better than Juvenile Hall, where he spent five sleepless nights going through withdrawal.

He didn’t have much choice. He was going to have to make the best of things as long as he was stuck here.

With everyone on their feet, Carreira bellowed the same line he used every other morning:

“Good morning, campers! Welcome to another day in paradise!”

Not Necessarily a Panacea

It felt more like hell.

From the predawn wake-up calls, to the backbreaking work in the forest clearing mudslides and pruning poison oak, to the afternoons and evenings filled with schoolwork and calisthenics, the boys’ days were uninterrupted toil.

Opened in October and nestled in the oaks and pines off Paradise Road in Santa Barbara County, the Tri-County Boot Camp is a local experiment that aims to turn troubled boys--such as R.E., Fernando, Jess and Jaime--away from crime.

Politicians, judges, police and social workers have invested their hopes and $1.1 million of public funds in it.

Forty teenage boys invest four months each among the rustic single-story buildings and playing fields off the winding country road of the ungated camp.

The camp is cradled in a small valley near the Santa Ynez River. On the grounds are a cluster of small school buildings, a large A-frame barracks and a wood-frame mess hall with large windows looking out on the trees that veil the camp from the road. At the far end of the camp, a gymnasium is being built.

The boys come from Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. They arrive at different times for their 120-day terms, which they can whittle to 90 with good behavior and hard work.

When they leave the camp, they are closely supervised, checking in every week with probation officers for at least six months.

*

Ventura County’s first venture into a boot camp program comes nearly a decade after other communities opened the spartan camps--first for adult offenders and then for youngsters who showed promise of turning their lives around.

The idea is to use the regimented program to instill discipline and order in the lives of troubled teenagers.

The reality is that youthful offenders are just as likely to return to gangs, drugs or crime when they graduate from boot camp as when they leave Juvenile Hall.

“Apart from some promising work in New York, adult and juvenile boot camps have not saved money or affected recidivism rates,” said Beth Carter of the Campaign for Effective Crime Policy in Washington, D.C.

A 1997 U.S. Justice Department study showed that boot camps in Colorado, Ohio and Alabama were no more successful at turning troubled teens around than other forms of juvenile detention. After five years of work, the California Youth Authority found much the same thing and closed its two camps in 1996.

But the bottom line for Ventura County is it was cheaper and quicker to open a boot camp with two neighboring counties than to build a new juvenile jail.

The county desperately needs more space to hold its juvenile delinquents. Its three facilities for juveniles are all filled--or over capacity--and the number of youths coming through the system has more than doubled since 1985.

This year, 2,000 kids will be booked into the county’s Juvenile Hall. Officials estimate it will cost $20 million to build a Justice Center to replace the aging Juvenile Hall and increase its capacity.

Meanwhile, Santa Barbara County had a facility that could easily be converted to a boot camp. And the federal government was willing to front 75% of the cost for setting up the camp.

“Boot camps are trendy,” said Carol Hurtt, a division chief at Frank A. Colston Youth Center and the Juvenile Restitution Program in Ventura until this month. “They floated a lot of money out there for this sort of program, so frankly that’s what we did.”

*

And more money may soon be on the way. If the governor signs a bill passed by the Assembly in January, voters will consider a $200-million bond measure to build or expand county boot camps, which are now in place in 23 California counties. The state money would match local funds.

Now that the boot camp program is running, Ventura County officials say they are determined to make it work. They have incorporated some of the features that have proven successful elsewhere, particularly the emphasis on what happens to the boys when they leave the camp.

“We didn’t even want to call it a boot camp, because we tried to make it different,” said Superior Court Judge Melinda Johnson, who until January was the presiding judge of Ventura County’s Juvenile Court.

The tri-county camp includes job training and remedial education in addition to the frequent follow-up visits with probation officers when the youths graduate.

But ultimately it’s up to the youths themselves, Johnson said. Some will make it and some won’t.

“I don’t think it was ever considered a cure-all,” Johnson said. “What it is is another option for us, and more space that we desperately need. We know some of these kids won’t make it, but we hold out hope for all of them.”

Adjusting to a New Way of Life

Jaime wanted the boot camp to work.

He had a job, he had a girlfriend. He didn’t need another arrest. He was tired of breaking his grandmother’s heart.

He arrived at the camp in October, shackles on his feet and hands as the white van rumbled past a row of campers marching in single file.

A guard unlocked the shackles and led Jaime and an Oxnard boy named Miguel into the barracks.

“This will definitely be your easiest day,” Dan Fondern, a tall, muscular former Army officer, whispered ominously.

Sonia Alcantar, another juvenile detention officer, filled in the details:

From the moment the boys would be jerked from their sleep at 6 a.m. until lights-out at 9:30 p.m., every moment of their long hard days would be planned.

“When we say it’s time to ‘utilize,’ that’s when you use the latrine,” Alcantar said.

“When we call ‘bunks,’ that means you stand at attention at the foot of your bed,” Alcantar told them. “ ‘Attention’ is feet at 45-degree angle, hands on the seams of your trousers and eyes straight ahead.” Jaime--a tall, bright-eyed teenager with thick black hair, nervously tried to joke with her.

“So can we get a furlough to go home?”

“Yeah, in 90 days if you’re good,” she shot back.

Alcantar went over the proper way to address anyone in the camp, using Mr. or Mrs., and how to tuck pants into boots. She went through some of the rules: No pinups. No pictures of girlfriends. No visits from friends. No reading material except what the camp provides.

The lesson went on for almost an hour.

Then Alcantar paused and looked at each of them for a moment and said:

“You try to escape or something and you’re out. Once you’re kicked out, you can’t come back here. That’s it.” The kids know that the alternative could mean more time incarcerated or possibly harsher treatment in the California Youth Authority.

Next came a ritual designed to detach them from their gang ties.

They were stripped of their baggy street clothes and given drab brown uniforms. Their hair was buzzed off; about a half-inch was left because some gangs identify themselves with shaved heads.

Then came the spiel from camp supervisor Alan Bolender.

Bolender had been in the Army Airborne Division, but his quiet tone, kind eyes and bushy gray mustache make him seem more like a friendly wood-shop teacher than a screaming disciplinarian. Yet during his brief talks with the boys, he let his tough side flare.

“Leave that gang stuff on the street,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about, Miguel. Right?”

Miguel stared back at Bolender and said nothing. At his side Jaime listened attentively, nodding as if to say he was finished with all that kind of behavior.

Gang Ties, and Ways, Still Have Power

Of course, it wasn’t as if the boys hadn’t already done time.

“We all grew up together in the can,” said R.E., a veteran of a dozen stays at Colston Youth Center and the Clifton Tatum Center, also called Juvenile Hall, both in Ventura.

There, everyone was divided along racial and gang lines. Friends hung out together. Cell blocks were taken over by boys from certain neighborhoods. People fought all the time.

At boot camp, though, fights are rare. With half a dozen officers on duty at any time, violence is unlikely.

Besides, these boys were selected not because they were seen as irredeemably hard core but because police and social workers thought there might be some hope of turning them around.

Boot camp makes it almost impossible to connect with the gang members back home. Visits are allowed only on Sundays, and only from parents and siblings younger than 10. One monitored phone call to parents once a week is permitted. Letters are screened, any with gang symbols returned.

Even staring at-- “mad-dogging”-- another camper is an offense that can mean a couple of hours to work off.

But old habits die hard. A few skinheads from Ventura and Simi Valley would slyly raise their

hands in a Nazi salute whenever they had questions. And over time the boys developed keen skills for quietly tormenting their rivals.

Fernando and R.E. almost came to blows after trading insults on a work crew one day.

“R.E. can dish it out but he can’t take it,” Fernando boasted. “I think it’s funny when he gets into trouble.”

Afterward the two weren’t allowed on the same crew.

A 17-year-old former high school football player named Eddie kept his eye on a guy from a rival gang.

“His friends jumped me awhile back. If we was in the Hall, we would have fought by now,” said Eddie, who had been arrested for a string of robberies. “But it’s not worth it in here.”

Instead the boys focus on one thing: early release. It isn’t worth getting into trouble and losing precious weeks.

After all, the days are long and hard at the camp.

From the three-minute supervised bathroom visits to the work details clearing brush in the forest to catch-up math and English classes, every minute of the 16-hour day is accounted for.

There is no idle time, and the boys are never alone. A juvenile detention officer--dressed in a blue polo shirt, camouflage pants and combat boots--is always looking over their shoulder.

But it’s more than that.

It’s the work, the foul bathroom smells, the constant commands, the rashes from the poison oak in the woods, the write-ups for tiny offenses such as having a pen in bed, the lack of privacy.

“You always got somebody sleeping next to you,” Fernando said. “Somebody’s smelly clothes in your face. They time you when you go to the bathroom and take a shower. There’s no walls and everybody sees you. There’s nothing to block them from seeing you. Sometimes it’s embarrassing.”

Those first few weeks, they all hated the boot camp and just wanted out.

Temptations to Defy the System

“I can get you out of here,” said Miguel, the 15-year-old Oxnard gang member.

Miguel was bragging about it to his work crew one day.

He was younger than a lot of the guys, but Miguel still looked and acted like the oldest and toughest guy at the camp. He had a scruffy goatee and sideburns, and a big block-lettered gang tattoo on his biceps. He had a studied swagger and a don’t-mess-with-me look.

“I know how to get out of here,” the others would later recall him saying, urging them to join in the escape. “You’d be in Santa Barbara in 20 minutes, Ventura in an hour.”

The crew--dressed in faded Branders blue jeans, scuffed combat boots and neon-orange sweatshirts--was picking up trash and clearing brush at Lake Cachuma.

Looking around at the lake and almost empty parking lot, Fernando and Jess thought about it.

With the detention officer out of earshot, Miguel egged them on. He had only been in for 10 days, and wasn’t planning on spending his life here.

*

Ever since he arrived with Jaime, Miguel had been mocking the ones who jumped to the orders of the detention officers. Nobody could tell him what to do. He had been written up for getting in trouble at the hall and things weren’t going any better here.

He was in for robbery, and had a couple of other charges hanging over his head.

The word was that they would eventually send him to the California Youth Authority for a year. Miguel acted as if he had nothing to lose.

Already, he had convinced a friend from Ventura County and one of the young guys from Santa Barbara to make the break with him. Now he was looking for more recruits.

He had a plan. He saw a pickup truck near where they were working and said he knew how to steal it.

Fernando and Jess heard the pitch. They weren’t sure what they had to lose.

“Come on, man. I can get you out of here,” Miguel urged. “Let’s jam.”

It was a tempting offer.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About This Series

“County Report: Boot Camp Justice” is a three-part series that follows Ventura County teens through the Tri-County Boot Camp that opened in October. Today’s story chronicles the adjustments the boys must make to the spartan, regimented life at the camp. County probation officials gave Times reporter Scott Hadly and photographer Spencer Weiner access to all aspects of the camp, but asked that the newspaper not print the last names of the boys there. In one instance, The Times is using a youth’s initials.