Juvenile Justice Coming of Age

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 in El Rio, just outside Oxnard, 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 hall in Ventura and centralize programs and services that are now 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 on June 22 comes as counties across the state are expanding, refurbishing or rebuilding antiquated and 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.

But the $40.5-million grant Ventura County received in 1999 remains the largest ever given for a juvenile facility, said Doug Holien, a Board of Corrections field representative. The county will pick up the remainder of the project’s cost.

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

The idea--proposed 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 to facilities ill-equipped to handle them.

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

The facility will also be among the state’s first to use a “podular design,” Holien said.

The complex’s 240-bed juvenile hall portion--primarily for teens 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.

But 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 among 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 84-bed Clifton Tatum Center on Hillmont Avenue in Ventura, built in 1965.

There, youths are doubled up in tiny cells that can’t be easily supervised by officers because they are located on long, narrow corridors. Classroom space is so tight that teachers give lessons out of small cafeterias or youths study independently in their rooms. Psychologists and medical doctors, who serve 120 young offenders housed in the facility on an average day, work in 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. “We’re constantly worried about them assaulting each other.”

County officials, led by Supervisor Judy Mikels, began a serious push for a new juvenile correctional facility in 1995. It has been a sometimes bumpy road.

After securing the $40.5-million grant, officials struggled to find a location while facing tight state deadlines. The county’s financial crisis in 1999 threatened to delay the project and, just last fall, spiraling construction costs caused officials to cut from the plan a multipurpose room and vocational training center.

The proposed site shifted from land at Camarillo Airport, eliminated because of FAA 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 the site was opposed by the Rio Elementary School District, that controversy appears to have subsided, Remington said.

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

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

Plans are underway to expand a 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. The food is then doled out at minimal cost to 216 local agencies, who help feed 34,000 people 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%.”

When the work education program moves to the new site, Mason said, the ease of access should increase participation. The food bank, which is often short on volunteers, hopes to begin sorting the donated food eight hours a day, seven days a week.

“The need is that great,” Mason said.

The youth offenders themselves compliment the program and say they hope it will be expanded.

One 17-year-old offender working at the food bank Friday said he knows his mother benefits from the food he’s helping sort. He said he’ll continue to volunteer at Food Share, 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.”