Ventura County Juvenile Hall Project Begins

Envisioning what he called a much-needed sanctuary for Ventura County’s troubled youth, Justice Steven Z. Perren helped break ground Friday on a $65-million juvenile hall and treatment complex that will bear his name.

“Some may see this as a children’s jail, but it is much more than that,” said Perren, the former Ventura County juvenile court judge who conceived of the integrated center, which will include rehabilitation programs, courtrooms and classrooms. “The bricks and mortar that will stand here will be a place in which what we need to do can be done.”

Perren, now an associate justice in the Court of Appeals, was one of about 100 local politicians, county employees and judges who gathered at the El Rio site, consisting of 45 dusty acres with a contrasting backdrop of undeveloped hillsides and factory smokestacks.

“Someone said to me, ‘This sure is an ugly place,’ but it won’t be,” said county Supervisor Judy Mikels, who began pushing for a new juvenile hall as early as 1995. “It’s not going to be a concrete jail we warehouse our youth in. It will be a facility for kids in the system, in hopes of getting them out of the system permanently.”

When it opens in September 2003, the complex will house up to 420 juvenile offenders, relieving overcrowding at the county’s cramped, dilapidated juvenile hall and centralizing programs and services now scattered throughout the county.

The California Department of Corrections awarded a $40.5-million grant to cover construction costs for the modern complex. The county agreed to fund $25 million to complete the project, which follows a national trend of “one-stop” juvenile justice centers that include not only detention cells but treatment programs and schools.

“This is an investment in our youth who have gone astray but are not forgotten,” said Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara). “It may not look like much, but it represents the hope we have as a society for our future.”

The facility will include a 240-bed juvenile hall that will house 15-cell pods, each attached to a classroom, common area and small recreation yard. The other 180 beds will be in three camps.

One of those camps will be dedicated to emotionally disturbed youths, who are considered the most underserved group in the county’s system because they are mixed in with other juvenile inmates and often lack adequate treatment.

Another camp will be reserved for older offenders now housed at the county’s Work Education Restitution and Competency facilities in Camarillo. The third will be for juvenile offenders under age 14, most of whom are housed at the Tri-County Boot Camp in Santa Barbara or the crowded Colston Youth Center in Ventura.

The county’s six-year effort to build the facility has had its share of bumps, as officials scrambled to meet several state-imposed deadlines.

“It’s been more pressure-filled than any other project I’ve worked on,” Mikels said.

And it’s not over yet.

With the additional space and staff requirements, the new complex will add about $10 million in the first year to the county’s juvenile justice system costs, which currently come to $2.3 million. When the center is complete, it will cost more than $16 million to operate annually.

Probation agency leaders will spend the next two years moving into the new facility and finding permanent funding sources. County officials moved ahead on the project before solidifying operation costs in order to get the $40.5-million state grant.

They are confident it will come together.

“We have to make it work,” Mikels said. “The other facility is totally unacceptable.”

That 84-bed center, on Hillmont Avenue in Ventura, is named after Clifton Tatum, its former superintendent, who dedicated himself to the facility during the 18 years he worked there. He died from a heart attack at age 40 in January 1975, while riding his bike through his Oxnard neighborhood.

Tatum’s 73-year-old widow, Frances, his son, Lucius, grandson Clifton and niece Daisy were among those in the audience at Friday’s groundbreaking. The juvenile hall portion of the new complex will bear Tatum’s name.

“I am in such awe of the whole thing,” Frances Tatum said. “My husband would be so proud to know people thought so much of him.”