Suspended Youth Prison Official Is Replaced

The director of the California Youth Authority has replaced a suspended administrator with two new assistant superintendents as part of an ongoing campaign to reform the scandal-plagued juvenile prison.

CYA Director Gregorio Zermeno continued to clean house at the embattled Ventura School on Friday by assigning department veterans James Dowling and Cassandra Stansberry to the facility near Camarillo.

Dowling, currently program administrator at a youth prison in Whittier, will replace Assistant Supt. Chuck Kubasek, who was suspended last month, along with two other top administrators, after state investigators uncovered a pattern of mismanagement and sexual misconduct at the facility.

And Stansberry, a parole agent at the Whittier facility, is being brought on to emphasize the evolution of the state’s only coed youth prison into two facilities, one for males and the other for females.

In January 1998, the Ventura School separated male and female wards for the first time since it became a coed institution in 1970.

Construction is scheduled to start in the fall on a 16-foot fence crowned with razor wire that will separate the two sections. That work should be completed by the following spring.

“There’s going to be more changes at the Ventura School, obviously,” CYA spokesman J.P. Tremblay said. “In effect it’s going to be two separate facilities within the one, once the fence is fully constructed and they build some additional classrooms.”

The administrative shuffling is the latest in a series of moves undertaken in the wake of scandals that have rocked the juvenile prison.

Last month the state inspector general’s office issued a scathing report detailing a “systemic problem” of lax management that minimized sexual misconduct among employees and inmates and resulted in unfair treatment and sexual harassment of women employees.

The report noted “a climate of fear among employees,” a system slow to take action to solve problems and cited with 64 misconduct investigations by internal affairs in 1998 alone.

Embroiled in those controversies, former CYA Director Francisco Alarcon was removed from his position earlier this month by Gov. Gray Davis. That came on the heels of the suspension of Kubasek, school Supt. Mary Herrera and security chief James J. McDuffy.

Herrera, a 23-year California Youth Authority veteran, was demoted last week and reassigned as a deputy superintendent to a youth correctional facility in Chino. The futures of Kubasek and McDuffy are yet to be determined, and both remain on paid administrative leave.

Tremblay, however, said it’s certain that Kubasek will not return to Camarillo.

“He’s out of there,” Tremblay said. “What happens to him I couldn’t say at this point.”

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

State Sen. Cathie Wright, who requested the inspector general’s investigation, said she is pleased to learn Kubasek had been replaced and the Ventura School is pushing forward with efforts to separate male and female wards.

But she said she will continue to push for reforms at the institution until she is satisfied the problems have gone away.

“Until I see them take the manual and run that place by the book, I’m going to be on their necks,” Wright said. “And I mean right from the top to the bottom of that whole place. They’re going to be the model for when I go after the other schools.”