Probation Chief’s Views Clash With Trend Toward Tough Juvenile Justice

It’s hard to tell what rankles the old guard more in this conservative, rural county: the fact that the local probation chief says he won’t send young criminals to the hard-line California Youth Authority or the way he turned juvenile hall into a touchy-feely haven of psychotherapy and bedtime stories.

Or maybe it’s his propensity for inviting juvenile delinquents to live right in his family home.

What’s clear is that Chief Probation Officer John Lum may have rankled for the last time. Lum has been placed on paid administrative leave, facing a grievance filed by 17 of his 138 employees. He will remain at home at least until an investigation is completed.

The saga of John Lum has divided this county. There are those who see him as a permissive, undisciplined apologist for young criminals. And there are those who see him as a courageous maverick, fighting for kids who deserve a second chance.

His internal exile exemplifies, to some, just how far the state has tilted away from rehabilitation and toward punishment for young people.

California 2000 is a place of new juvenile boot camps and of Proposition 21--the ballot measure that sends more and younger offenders to prison. The tough policies for youths remain, even if the state’s voters relented a little by passing Proposition 36, the measure that will direct many drug offenders into treatment rather than prison.

Lum has never strayed from the conviction that human beings can be saved. He believes in nurturing delinquents with dog-training classes, mentor programs and, on occasion, field trips to the beach.

“I think he is progressive, innovative, humane, thoughtful and courageous,” said San Luis Obispo defense attorney Kevin McReynolds. “But there are others here who just have a real problem with his philosophy.”

One probation officer calls Lum a Marxist. And in an anonymous four-page letter to the county Board of Supervisors, Probation Department employees complained: “The chief’s micro-managing never has to do with increasing public safety. It always involved placing less restrictions on some very dangerous criminals who the courts expect will be actively supervised.”

San Luis Obispo officials said they expect the review to conclude this month. They declined to divulge the allegations against Lum. But the anonymous letter sent to supervisors and the county grand jury covers about 20 issues, accusing Lum of everything from having a “volatile and frightening temper,” to alienating and embarrassing key employees, to failing to keep a regular office routine, to ignoring the rights of crime victims.

The letter says “high-risk offenders” in 160 cases have been left unsupervised, while some probation officers attend to other, nebulous duties. It says Lum offended some staff members when he sent out a New Year’s message that included a Maya Angelou poem containing “sexual overtones.”

In a rebuttal, 19 staff members praised Lum as an innovator, adding: “We have never witnessed anything but high standards, solid leadership and the utmost integrity from Chief Lum.”

Lum called the accusations silly, slanted or simply untrue. He denied, for example, that probationers were going unsupervised. Instead, he said, he had reconfigured caseloads so his deputies could pay more attention to dangerous offenders while giving less supervision to others.

He insisted that his opponents’ real problem is with his “restorative” justice policies.

“It is far easier to be punitive,” Lum said. “It’s far easier to assume all these individuals are going to screw up. But the very purpose of probation and of the law is to take calculated risks with human beings with the hope and the goal and the expectation that they can and will be better.”

Controversy has surrounded Lum, 51, almost from the moment he arrived nearly seven years ago in San Luis Obispo. But anti-Lum sentiments peaked this fall after a series of cases in which his department sought, and often won, lenient treatment for juvenile offenders.

The case of Daniel Contreras brought the issue to a head. Contreras, 19, had been convicted of manslaughter in the stabbing death of a 16-year-old from Paso Robles.

At the time of Contreras’ sentencing, Lum decided to depart from previous procedure. He allowed for dissenting views by his staff in a probation report. The result was that one probation officer disputed claims that Contreras was a gang member and insisted that he was a good candidate for rehabilitation.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Kraut called the probation report “biased and misinformative.” The prosecutor sharply told a judge that the Probation Department leaned over backward for the young criminal instead of the victim’s family.

In the end, the prosecutor got his way. Contreras received the maximum sentence, 14 years in prison, for his part in the killing. But that didn’t soothe bad feelings in the county’s criminal justice community.

The police chief in Paso Robles, among others, criticized the handling of the case. Many of Lum’s deputy probation officers were furious. One, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he said he feared retribution, called it “a stain on our collective self-esteem.”

The local newspaper and some law enforcement figures have routinely pointed out that Lum appears to be out of step with much of the county’s power structure. A banner headline proclaimed, for instance, that neighboring counties would have recommended prison time for Contreras.

Lum said the procedure of allowing multiple views in a probation report is fair and logical. “No one human being,” he said, “knows everything there is to know about another human being.”

The case provoked such strong emotions, in part, because of what had come before.

Lum already had a reputation as a progressive when he arrived 6 1/2 years ago from San Jose, where he helped establish a separate agency to operate the Santa Clara County jails.

Early in Lum’s San Luis Obispo tenure, it became clear that he would have an unusual amount of personal involvement with the delinquents and petty felons locked up at the county’s Juvenile Services Center.

Field Trips as Rewards

One troubled foster child, who had been raised in the Lum family home, landed in the county juvenile lockup. Employees were soon complaining that they felt an unspoken pressure to give the boy special attention, even when he broke the rules.

Then, Lum began taking some kids from the lockup on field trips to reward good behavior. Anonymous employees questioned his judgment, particularly when he went body surfing and for a soak in his backyard hot tub with one offender.

In the summer of 1999, Lum suffered a headline-grabbing humiliation.

He had taken another young probationer into his home. Keith Duggan was a juvenile offender and alleged gang member, with clown faces tattooed across the back of his shaved head. But the probation chief thought Duggan just needed some help to establish himself and so allowed the 19-year-old to live in a cubicle in the family’s converted garage.

While living there, Duggan was implicated as a member of a gang of teenagers that jumped, pummeled and stabbed a teenager from a rival group.

Police searched Duggan’s niche in the Lum house. They found a small bag of marijuana and photographs they said linked Duggan to a local gang. Duggan pleaded guilty and served a short jail sentence for the beating.

Lum is somewhat contrite about the incidents. He has stopped taking minors from juvenile hall on field trips. He’s not likely, any time soon, to invite others with criminal pasts to live in his home.

But he does not apologize for his intentions. “I am a believer,” he said, “that what you want to do is inculcate kids into the society, not shun them.”

His wife and five grown daughters--including three who still live at home--feel the same way. “Just because these kids are born in some of these situations, they are really not bad,” said wife Kristie Lum. “They really have a lot of good in them. That’s what we believe.”

Lum’s activism has exceeded the bounds of his own county. He has criticized the California Youth Authority, the state’s youth prison system, for creating a “threat to public safety” by mistreating its thousands of prisoners. He called the boot camps that Gov. Gray Davis and others are so fond of “a dumping ground for young Latinos.” He vocally opposed Proposition 21, saying it would do nothing to make the streets safer.

But this is San Luis Obispo County, where nearly two-thirds of voters endorsed Proposition 21, the measure to lock up more young criminals, and where Republicans hold a strong plurality. In presidential voting, George W. Bush outpolled Al Gore here by more than 12 percentage points (Ralph Nader won 6% of the vote).

David Edge, the county’s chief administrative officer, said Lum’s views make him a “lightning rod.”

In Lum’s absence, volunteers keep reading their charges to sleep each night at the Juvenile Services Center. On a recent evening, a woman’s warm singsong voice echoed over the public address system with “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” The “Heeling Touch” dog training classes go on. And one volunteer says she is “heartsick over what they are doing to John Lum.”

Lum looks a little melancholy himself, stuck at his home in Los Osos, overlooking wetlands and the ocean beyond. One of his daughters quips that he paces a lot and picks at his nails. But he is painting the house and catching up on chores.

He says he is sick of “swimming up a Niagara Falls” of political opinion. Sometimes he thinks of moving on, other times of staying to fight.

“My job is not just my job,” Lum said. “It’s part of my life. It’s part of who I am. That is why it hurts to be treated like this.”