Funding OKd for Growth of Juvenile Halls

Over the angry objections of community activists, the state Board of Corrections allocated $131 million Thursday to build or renovate juvenile jails throughout the state, the largest such expansion in decades.

The board, however, rejected funding for the project that activists found the most odious: a 210-bed juvenile hall in Alameda County. The board voted instead to give the money to a similar project in Sacramento.

Among the projects slated to receive money are a 20-bed expansion of a facility for girls in San Diego, a new 200-bed juvenile hall in the High Desert of San Bernardino County and a 240-bed expansion and parking lot at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey.

The Downey project was bitterly opposed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Activists argued that the money should instead be used for education, counseling and employment programs, particularly for minority youths.

“It is really a shame what we are doing to our children,” said Javier Stauring, director of the archdiocese’s juvenile detention ministry. “We need to move away from a primitive system that doesn’t work.”

But Thomas McConnell, executive director of the Board of Corrections, said that the state has fewer juvenile hall beds per capita than it did 20 years ago and that at least a dozen juvenile facilities run by county governments are so dilapidated that state and federal agencies are on the verge of citing them as unsafe.

“We don’t disagree” with the protesters, McConnell said. “We know there has to be a balance between prevention and intervention. But we also know that there are some people who have to be in detention both for their safety and for society.”

Los Angeles County probation chief Richard Shumsky called the $24-million appropriation for Los Padrinos “a tremendous step.” The county, he said, is not attempting to increase the number of juveniles in detention.

“We hope that our [juvenile hall] population will be maintained and maybe even diminish, because we are trying to create new programs,” he said. “But there will always be a base number of kids who have to be kept in juvenile hall. . . . We want that number to be housed in safe, adequate housing.”

The San Bernardino County project, to be built north of Victorville, is meant to ease crowding at the county’s 52-year-old main juvenile hall. The board approved $19.3 million toward an estimated price tag of $31 million; the county, which will make up the balance, hopes to complete the detention center by July 2004.

In the last quarter of 2000, the 1949 facility averaged 545 youths, nearly twice its official capacity of 277. Youths sleep in classrooms and on stacked bunk beds. The county was recently forced to plan a tent city to accommodate the overflow.

“This is a great step forward for our county,” Chief Probation Officer Ray Wingerd said of the state allocation. “We need the space.”

San Bernardino County also has a $2-million plan to expand a juvenile facility in Rancho Cucamonga and to implement a house-arrest program for some juveniles.

The board’s decision to reject the Alameda County project was for reasons that differed from those put forth passionately by 75 protesters, most from the San Francisco Bay Area.

The protesters branded the project--a new 210-bed juvenile hall in Dublin next to a county jail and state prison--racist and alleged that the county prefers to deal with troubled teenagers, particularly from minority communities, by putting them behind bars.

“They say they’re rehabilitation centers, but they have cells,” said Fela Thompson, a leader of the Youth Force Coalition. “They’re really just getting us ready for prison.”

Board members rejected the $2.3-million project, not because of philosophic opposition but because Alameda County was already slated to receive $33.1 million to build a 330-bed juvenile hall at the same site that will replace a 50-year-old facility.

“It’s good public policy to invest our limited dollars in as many counties as possible,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who led the move to direct the money instead to Sacramento.

The 11 county projects for which funding was approved Thursday would provide a net gain of 800 juvenile hall beds. The state, with a population of 34 million, has about 12,000 beds in juvenile facilities.

In San Diego, Polly Merickel, the chief deputy probation officer, said the $800,000 allocation for 20 additional beds there will help the county cope with an increasing number of girls sentenced to detention.

“San Diego’s juvenile offenders are becoming increasingly more troubled and violent,” she said.

The Board of Corrections--with 10 of 13 members appointed by the governor--meets bimonthly to help local counties deal with issues of incarceration and rehabilitation of adults and juveniles.

The money doled out Thursday was a combination of state and local allocations. Officials said it is unlikely that there will be additional allocations for juvenile facilities in the foreseeable future.

“We need to give to juvenile the same priority we have to adult prison construction,” said Sylvia J. Johnson, chief probation officer for Alameda County.

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Times staff writer Greg Krikorian contributed to this story.