Keeping a Tent Jail Civilized

There will be no pink underwear.

Late last year, officers from San Bernardino County’s Central Juvenile Hall, the state’s most crowded youth jail, took a trip to Arizona.

About to become the first in California to house juvenile inmates in military-style tents, they arrived in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Sheriff Joe Arpaio runs famously unpleasant jails, forcing inmates to wear pink underwear, eat green bologna and live in tents that outrage civil rights activists.

San Bernardino officials had hoped to find a model to emulate. They say they found the opposite, a cruel amalgam of incarceration and demoralization that they are now striving to avoid.

After receiving the green light earlier this month from the state Board of Corrections, San Bernardino County will forge ahead with its $1.6-million plan--but is pitching a kinder, gentler Tent City for California.

Central Juvenile Hall Supt. George Post says San Bernardino County’s tents, six of them holding 20 boys apiece, will be torn down within three years and replaced with permanent buildings.

The tents will not be accompanied by pink underwear or other punitive measures, Post said. They will be similar to tents used by the U.S. military during the Persian Gulf War and will have wooden floors. Post promises that they will be safe, clean, heated, air-conditioned and pleasant--as pleasant as jail is supposed to be. The county has even hired an architect to build a one-eighth scale model before construction begins on an old baseball diamond inside Central’s fences.

“The day we were in Arizona it was raining,” said San Bernardino County Chief Probation Officer Ray Wingerd. “There were holes in the tents, and water was running all over the beds, all over electrical boxes where the lights were plugged in. We wanted to see what it looked like. But when we got back, we decided that our situation was going to be nothing like that.”

Arpaio, whether dyeing inmates’ underwear pink to shame them or forcing them to eat old bologna and live in shabby tents, says he is trying to remind inmates that they should never return to jail. But while the Arizona sheriff tries to send a message, San Bernardino County officials say they are building tents merely to find a temporary solution to a terrible problem.

Central’s official capacity is 277 youths--but last year, the facility’s average daily population was 537, with a high of 605 on Oct. 29. Though prisons and jails across California have struggled to keep pace with population growth and anti-crime measures, those figures make Central, statistically, the most overcrowded juvenile detention center in the state.

“We don’t intend to do any of that stuff they do [in Arizona],” said Post, Central’s superintendent for two years. “Tents are not an appropriate way to house and detain minors. We know that. It’s an emergency solution.”

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It is called Unit 14.

The pillbox building Post strolled through Tuesday afternoon, in the vernacular of juvenile justice, is not called a “cellblock”--just as judges don’t find teens “guilty,” they find that accusations against them are “true.” Teens are not “inmates,” technically. They are “wards.”

That is the confounding truth about facilities like Central. They are places for youths as young as 9--but many of those youths have committed very adult crimes. On any given day, as many as 25 of the “kids” at Central are there because they are accused of murder.

Outside Unit 14, fidgety kids in blue jumpsuits were being led through Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” by teacher Thomas Bean. “To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core,” one teen read aloud, “This and more I sat . . . describing?”

“Divining,” Bean corrected.

In many ways, it is a very real jail. Because inmates have been attacked for their Nikes, they are not allowed to wear their own shoes once they are incarcerated, and the standard-issue shoes are fastened with Velcro because, Post says, “we don’t like shoelaces.”

Almost every inmate is affiliated with an Inland Empire gang. Many Latinos belong to West Side Verdugo, many African Americans to Black Guerrilla Soldiers. There are white supremacists too. Racial tension leads to fistfights most days.

But the fights can just as easily be over extra peanut butter and jelly packets that a youth earns by helping out in the kitchen, said two wards--a 17-year-old from Highland and an 18-year-old from Victorville. They were allowed to talk to The Times, provided that they remained anonymous and that their offenses were not discussed.

The boys said that all of the tension, and all of the fighting, comes down to the overcrowding, which has exploded in recent years.

The youths were reading Poe outside Tuesday because their classroom, like most on the compound, has been converted into living space. Twenty teens assigned to 10 bunk beds were packed Tuesday into the 620-square-foot classroom, some playing cards, others watching television.

Because of space limitations, each is allowed just two books, either educational or religious, in a small drawer under the bunk. But some of the bunks are just inches apart from one another, and the precious few belongings in the drawers--books, letters, clothes--are regularly stolen.

“Juvenile Hall is not supposed to be comfortable,” said one 17-year-old ward. A well-spoken teen whose peach fuzz still hasn’t been shaved, he’s been at Central since July and earned his General Equivalency Diploma while incarcerated.

“But it becomes very uncomfortable here. You live with everybody’s bad habits. There is no space. You can’t get away from it. So there are fights all the time. Every small ordeal turns into a big ordeal.”

“Fights over stupid stuff,” the second teen said. “Peanut butter. Fresh sheets. A new pillow.”

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Central opened in 1949, when San Bernardino County’s population was about 280,000. In the next 40 years, as the Inland Empire became an escape hatch from Los Angeles and Orange counties, offering elbow room at a reasonable price, the county’s population quintupled to 1.4 million.

While the population soared, the county struggled against a rise in juvenile crime.

And that meant a ballooning youth offender population. On the average day in 1994, Central housed about 9% more inmates than its official capacity of 220. By 2000, a remodeling program had expanded capacity to 277--but on some days, the compound was 118% over capacity.

Until a 22-bed juvenile facility opened in nearby Rancho Cucamonga in 1998, San Bernardino County had not opened a new youth corrections facility in 27 years, Post said.

That made the tents necessary, said Bill Crout, deputy director of the state Board of Corrections, which regulates and inspects local adult and juvenile facilities.

The tents are the first of their kind in California for adults or youths. Orange County has fought its crowding problem recently by housing adults in larger, temporary but hard-walled structures.

“This is really only the last resort,” Crout said of the tents.

They are meant as a temporary salve--and they are only one component of a larger plan to combat overcrowding.

Central also plans to route 70 youths to home-detention programs, where they will be monitored with ankle bracelets. A permanent, 160-bed facility will open in San Bernardino in early 2003. And Wingerd said the county will apply in February for a $21-million state grant that would yield another 200-bed juvenile hall in Victorville, north of San Bernardino.

Only youths who have been adjudicated guilty in the court system will be housed in the tents.

No one has escaped from Central since 1991, and to ensure that the tents won’t pose an additional security risk, Post plans to spend about $368,000 a year to hire 50 new staff members. The tents, though they will be built inside Central’s existing fences, will be surrounded by an extra fence of their own.

Though the youths might not enter a permanent structure for weeks at a time, they will have modular classrooms, toilets and showers across the yard.

“This is significantly different than the god-awful conditions in Arizona,” said Elizabeth Schroeder of the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles. “It appears as if the county is attempting to provide facilities that at least meet some minimum standards.”

Still, she said, the ACLU and other prisoners’ rights organizations will be following the program closely--especially since California’s first experiment with these tents will use youths as its subjects.

“It will give the kids who are in the tents a very different sense of their detention, and we want to make sure the emphasis remains on rehabilitation,” she said.

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Tight Fit

Overcrowding at Central Juvenile Hall, San Bernardino County’s primary juvenile detention center, has been increasing steadily since 1994. In the next six months, Central will become the first jail facility in California to use military-style tents to house inmates.

Source: San Bernardino County