Top State Investigator Recommends CYA Reforms

Laying out a plan for broad reform, a top state investigator said Monday that he supports the suspension of administrators at Ventura School and has recommended top-to-bottom changes to rid the juvenile prison of chronic mismanagement and sexual misconduct.

Inspector General Lloyd Wood, detailing for the first time reforms he has recommended at the scandal-plagued Camarillo facility, urged better employee training, improvements in basic security and an aggressive new style of management that leads by positive example.

“With the attention this institution is getting, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for existing managers to function well if they went back” to Ventura School, Wood said.

While not officially recommending that the school’s three suspended administrators be permanently ousted, Wood said that he would back a decision to remove them if the state’s top prison official, Robert Presley, decides that action is warranted.

Ventura School Supt. Mary Herrera, Assistant Supt. Chuck Kubasek and security chief James J. McDuffy were suspended by Presley last week after Wood reported a 20-year pattern of mismanagement at the youth prison.

A final decision on the administrators’ future is expected soon--after Presley’s own investigators review the strength of evidence uncovered by Wood during a six-month inquiry.

“I support his actions,” Wood said. “There were a number of management issues of great concern to us at that facility. . . . I draw on my own experience, and in some areas management was failing, but not in all areas.

“Always as a manager, when anything goes wrong you have to make sure it’s not your fault, or the fault of your policies or the fault of the environment you created before you start holding individuals accountable,” said Wood, 59, a former police chief and city manager in Pomona. “That didn’t happen here.”

To be effective, punishment for misconduct should be swift and sure, he said. Instead, Ventura School administrators meted out punishment slowly and inconsistently, he said. That created an environment where managers and front-line workers tended to accept misconduct, he said.

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“I’m not sure they truly believed that they would never be punished,” he said. “I think they thought they would receive some sort of reprimand.”

Wood is in Ventura County to brief acting Ventura School Supt. Gregory C. Lowe on misconduct investigations still underway at the prison.

“We’re finishing up loose ends,” Wood said.

In a scathing analysis, Wood reported last week that Ventura School, the only coed facility in the California Youth Authority system, had “a systemic problem” of lax management that allowed sexual misconduct by employees and inmates to continue, and resulted in unfair treatment and sexual harassment of women employees.

He noted “a climate of fear among employees,” a system slow to react to chronic problems and an extraordinary 64 misconduct investigations by internal affairs in 1998 alone.

Wood’s report cited one case each where administrators Herrera and Kubasek allegedly were untruthful in comments to a state board. In addition, a former superintendent violated policy by engaging in sexual relations with subordinates, the report said.

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He found security so poor at the youth prison that a state investigator identified himself as a customer for a prison dog-grooming business and was admitted to the facility even though his ID did not match the name under which he had booked the appointment. Nor did guards question why a Northern Californian would travel as far as Camarillo for dog grooming, the report said.

On Monday, in an interview with The Times, Wood said that was not the only problem with Ventura School security. “In some cases, they actually had wards working on the security systems,” he said. “Some were working on the fencing.”

Wood recommended that inmates not be given such sensitive assignments.

He also recommended a full audit of the extent of employee nepotism, where managers have personal relations with subordinates, within the youth authority’s 15 prisons. The department’s policy prohibiting such personal relationships is not as clear as it should be, he said.

Former Supt. Manuel Carbajal had personal relationships with at least four women who worked for him at Ventura School, and with another subordinate after he was transferred to a youth authority facility in Norwalk in 1993, Wood reported.

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Carbajal acknowledged one long-term relationship with an employee at the Camarillo school and told investigators he paid one of his subordinates to be his masseuse, Wood said.

“In the Ventura School there were a notable amount of violations of the nepotism policy,” Wood said. “It makes for an uncomfortable work environment. And sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s a voluntary relationship or one resulting from the superior-subordinate relationship.”

The inspector general said his recommendations also focus on the ease with which employees and wards selected for maintenance and vocational training could separate themselves from the rest of the institution.

In particular, the prison’s maintenance managers--civil staffers not trained to control prisoners--would select wards for work outside the prison without clearing the task with correctional officers, Wood said.

“The wards had access to areas they shouldn’t have had, and that created a security risk,” Wood said. “They should have a better process for screening wards instead of allowing an individual manager to pick them.”

Wood also said his investigation revealed a lack of training so profound that some employees--and their bosses--didn’t even know that manuals existed outlining how they were supposed to do their jobs.

For example, employees chosen to investigate employee wrongdoing were so poorly trained they botched several investigations, he said.

“We’re making a recommendation that only fully trained investigators be allowed to conduct internal investigations,” he said. “We’ve had cases where investigators had little or no training.”

That allowed one female youth counselor to dodge discipline for years, according to Wood’s report. Although she was having a personal relationship with a male inmate, she was fired only after trying to intimidate a local resident in public while drunk.

Another investigation of longtime sexual misconduct has been reopened by the inspector general because the first was so poorly handled by marginally trained investigators, Wood said.

Substandard training also resulted in polygraph tests that indicated that female inmates lied when they complained of sexual misconduct by employees, Wood said. Investigations later confirmed the girls’ truthfulness, he said.

“The use of the polygraph was not well controlled or conducted properly,” Wood said. “There were a couple of cases that probably went to the detriment of the wards.”

The Ventura School has been a center of controversy since 1997, when state lawmakers accused the youth authority of covering up inmate rapes by guards. Three officers were later fired or forced out.

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The current turmoil has prompted two parallel investigations--the inspector general’s inquiry and a separate internal investigation into possible criminal sexual misconduct by employees.

A former Ventura School teacher was charged in January with having oral sex with 17-year-old inmates. And youth authority investigators say that criminal cases against seven other past and present employees have been sent to local prosecutors.

Nine school employees have been fired or forced out since April, authorities said.