New Juvenile Hall a Dream No More

After six years of competing for funds, searching for a site and fighting neighborhood opposition, Ventura County probation officials are poised to break ground next month on a $65-million juvenile justice center.

Surrounded by industrial businesses and strawberry fields on a 45-acre plot just outside of Oxnard in El Rio, the modern complex will house up to 420 juvenile offenders. When it opens in 2003, the center will relieve overcrowding at the dilapidated, 60-year-old juvenile facility in Ventura and centralize programs and services scattered throughout the county.

“The juvenile justice system works best when you have the resources to meet the needs, and right now we don’t have those resources,” said Cal Remington, chief county probation officer. “Nothing will make the system perfect, but this will make a big difference.”

The long-awaited groundbreaking, set for June 22, comes as counties across the state are expanding, refurbishing or rebuilding antiquated, overcrowded juvenile halls.

Last week, the state Board of Corrections approved the largest round of funding--$131 million for projects from Downey to San Diego--since the legislative push began four years ago.

The $40.5-million grant that Ventura County received in 1999 remains the largest ever given for a juvenile facility, said Doug Holien,[cq] a Board of Corrections field representative. The county will pay for rest of the costs.

Part of the project’s appeal, he said, is that it will draw in all branches of the county’s system for dealing with offenders under 18, including offices, courts, classrooms, counseling and rehabilitation programs, as well as the detention facility.

The idea--pushed by former Ventura County Juvenile Court Judge Steven Z. Perren, for whom the complex is named--is to bring services to the juvenile offenders rather than having to bus them out, move them around or keep them waiting in facilities ill-equipped to handle them.

“That chaos interferes with anything we try to do,” Remington said.

The Ventura County facility is among the state’s first in a wave of new centers using a new “podular design,” Holien said.

The 240-bed juvenile hall portion of the complex--mostly for youths awaiting court dates--includes 15-cell “pods” attached to a classroom, a common area and a small recreation yard. Meals will be brought to the minors and security is tight, said Karen Staples, chief deputy for special projects.

Plans for the 180-bed treatment and work-program buildings, where youths will prepare to transition back into the community, look much different. A dining area is separate from larger, dormitory-style rooms, and there are several classrooms so students can rotate between them, as if in a high school.

The modern design approach, officials say, is a giant step forward from juvenile halls of the past, including the Clifton Tatum Center on Hillmont Avenue in Ventura.

There, youths are doubled up in tiny cells that can’t be seen by supervising officers because they are located on long, skinny corridors. Classroom space is so tight that teachers run lessons out of small cafeterias or the youths study independently in their rooms. Psychologists and medical doctors, who serve the 120 young offenders housed in the 84-bed facility on an average day, operate out of closet-like spaces.

“With this many people in such a small space, tensions run high, and with that come the problems we see here,” said Evan Petrotti, supervising deputy probation officer for the Ventura County Probation Agency.

County officials, led by Supervisor Judy Mikels, began a serious push for a new juvenile correctional facility in 1995.

It has been a bumpy road.

After securing the $40.5-million grant, officials struggled to find a location while going up against tight state deadlines. The county’s financial crisis in 1999 threatened to delay the project and, last fall, spiraling construction costs caused officials to scale back the plan by cutting out a multipurpose room and vocational training center.

The proposed site shifted from land at the Camarillo Airport, eliminated because of Federal Aviation Administration restrictions, to a flower farm in Saticoy, which became too difficult to purchase, to the current site--a former strawberry field in El Rio.

Although this site at first met opposition from some in the community, namely the Rio Elementary School District, the controversy appears to have quieted, Remington said.

The only hurdle remaining is hiring a contractor, which should happen later this month. Assuming the lowest bid comes in at or below budget, Remington said, construction will begin immediately.

For the nonprofit Ventura County Food Share, which borders the future juvenile facility site, the complex couldn’t open soon enough.

Plans are underway to expand a new partnership that has several nonviolent juvenile offenders volunteering at the food bank three days a week.

The youths--who are assigned to the county’s Work Education Restitution and Competency program--sort and process food donated from grocery stores, which is then distributed at a minimal cost to 216 local agencies. Those agencies help feed 34,000 people in the county each month.

“It’s been tremendous,” said James R. Mason, president of the Food Share board of directors. “We’ve increased the amount we can process by 50%.”

One 17-year-old working at the food bank Friday said he knows that his mother, who lives in Oxnard, is benefiting from the food he’s helping to sort.

He’ll continue to volunteer at Food Share, he said, even when he is released from the county program.

“It makes me feel good knowing it’s going to poor people,” he said. “And I need to stay out of trouble.”