An Intense Nominee for Youth Authority

The man chosen by the governor this week to head the California Youth Authority has a resume that, on paper at least, makes him both a perfect and a potentially problematic candidate.

Jerry L. Harper rose through the ranks to the No. 2 post in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where he was known for high standards, concern for detail and intense focus.

Harper, who retired last year after 37 years of service, is viewed by friends and foes alike as a workaholic who gave everything to the nation’s largest sheriff’s department, a trait that may have helped drive him into two stress leaves to deal with depression.

Harper also headed the department during an extremely tumultuous period in 1997, when the U.S. Department of Justice issued a scathing report accusing it of housing mentally ill inmates in cramped, dingy cells where they languished for days or weeks without the medications they needed to keep their illnesses under control.

The situation--which apparently had gone on for years--was so serious that justice officials were preparing to take drastic legal measures to force the county to fix the problems.

But the department appeased federal officials by taking a number of steps, including hiring more mental health workers and moving the hundreds of mentally ill inmates out of their tight quarters at Men’s Central Jail into the new Twin Towers Jail. The Department of Justice, however, continues to closely monitor the situation.

Additionally, sheriff’s officials have struggled in recent years to fix a number of other problems in the county’s overcrowded jail system, including the holding of hundreds of inmates past their court-ordered release dates and the mistaken release of a handful of others because of paperwork mix-ups. Several homicide suspects are still at large after being released in error.

Merrick Bobb, a nationally recognized law enforcement expert who serves as special counsel to the Board of Supervisors, said that although there were problems in the county’s jail system during Harper’s tenure, he credits the former undersheriff with taking the steps necessary to fix many of the deficiencies.

“One of the reasons I think there were so many improvements was because the department had someone like Jerry around,” Bobb said. “Although the jail system still has a substantial way to go, I think Jerry can legitimately take credit for the measurable improvements in the last few years.”

Harper’s critics acknowledge that improvements in the jails were largely the result of the same personality traits they fault: his extreme dislike of criticism, his obsessive command of detail and his demanding nature.

Richard Foreman, former assistant sheriff, said Harper “took things very, very personally, more so than anyone else. He would read things in the newspaper and start bouncing off the walls and start composing letters to the editor.”

Still, he is credited with forming a county task force that ultimately accomplished the opening of Twin Towers, which had sat empty for three years after it was completed. He served as the department’s chief planner of security for the 1984 Olympics and, more recently, became an authority on riot and crowd control.

In Los Angeles County’s Hall of Administration, Harper was known as a tough but honest messenger. County Chief Administrative Officer David E. Janssen said he will volunteer to testify on Harper’s behalf when Harper’s appointment to the youth authority comes up for Senate confirmation.

“I have the highest admiration for Jerry Harper and his management abilities and skills,” Janssen said. “He basically ran the department for the sheriff, with a $1-billion budget.”

Los Angeles County Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky, a Democrat, and Don Knabe, a Republican, praised the former undersheriff.

“I found him to be very honest, straightforward and easy to deal with,” said Yaroslavsky, who was recently appointed to the Board of Corrections, where he would serve with Harper.

Knabe, whose relationship with Harper extends back to the supervisor’s days as a councilman in Cerritos, which contracts with the Sheriff’s Department, said Harper had “a strong character. I always felt that he was dealing with me up front.”

Within the department, Harper was known for being something of a taskmaster and disdainful of what he considered half-baked ideas. He almost always wore his uniform; his son and daughter-in-law are both sheriff’s deputies.

Some called Harper the department’s Omar Bradley.

“He was our soldiers’ general,” said Capt. Garry Leonard, who served as Harper’s aide for a year. “Every deputy identified with him because he was one of us. He’d show up at the transportation bureau at midnight to see how things were going. He’d work 18 hours a day.”

Harper has said that his two stress leaves--one in the mid-1980s and the other in 1991--were the result of overwork and that he received counseling to overcome depression. Awareness of the leaves was widespread in the department. One associate recalls that he would sometimes ask a harried colleague: “You’re not going to Jerry Harper on us, are you?”

Harper, currently a security consultant, left this week for a trip to Asia.

According to his friends and associates, Harper was his own worst enemy, leaving his office on Fridays with stacks of paperwork under his arm and pushing himself to work excessively long hours, including two hours of physical exercise before dawn most mornings. He returned from his leaves with renewed vigor--but also took up golf. He enjoys classical music and reading.

Michael Bustamante, Gov. Gray Davis’ spokesman, who knows Harper from his days working as an aide to Supervisor Gloria Molina, said that the appointment is extremely important to the governor and that the administration stands firmly behind Harper. The last director of the youth authority, Gregorio Zermeno, left the job after just 10 months amid reports of brutality in the youth prison system. Davis didn’t know Zermeno before he was hired, Bustamante said.

As a result, Davis “wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. . . . The governor has no doubt that Jerry will do a fantastic job for him in a very important agency,” Bustamante said.

Sheriff Lee Baca, who tapped Harper to head his transition team, said through a spokesman that he discussed Harper’s appointment with the governor because he believed the former undersheriff would tackle agency problems creatively.

The California Youth Authority has its own share of serious problems: It is under scrutiny by state investigators, brought in by Davis, who are examining allegations of mistreatment of juveniles by officers.

Even those who criticize Harper say he will immerse himself in the details of the state’s 11 youth prisons. They point not only to his work with the jails, but also to his ability to keep the department on budget at a time when county funding shortfalls were common.

“Millions of dollars disappeared from the budget and yet the department was still expected to function at a high standard,” Foreman said. “He kept the department functioning. That was his forte.

“He is one that not only wants to be briefed on a subject, he wants to read and know everything and then be briefed,” Foreman said. “He would drive his subordinates nuts . . . [with constant research projects], some of which never went anyplace.”

Foreman, who has known Harper since he went through the academy, quipped: “If we were a submarine crew, we would have thrown him down the torpedo tube a long time ago.”

Paul Myron, a recently retired undersheriff who now has a temporary job with the youth authority and has known Harper since 1965, said he believes Harper’s experiences will serve him well.

“He knows budgets, legislation, jails,” Myron said. “If there’s a better guy in the state, then I don’t know him. . . . It’s uninformed bigots who would question him” because of his stress leaves.

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* SHAWN HUBLER

It’s a good thing society loves its children so, because otherwise it might be hard to tell. B12