Help Teens Now or Pay Later

Orange County’s Joplin Youth Center, charged with the task of getting youth offenders back on a civilized track, faces a big problem that, left unsolved, will make it even more difficult to do the job.

The situation boiled over earlier this month when a judge threw out a county environmental impact report supporting a plan to expand the Trabuco Canyon detention center. The judge said the county could go back to the drawing board, but the delay means the county Probation Department is likely to lose an $8.4-million state grant needed to help finance the $18-million facility. That represents a potentially fatal blow to the planned 90-bed Rancho Potrero Leadership Academy, which would relieve overcrowding at the Joplin facility.

Trabuco Canyon residents who sued the county over the project are welcoming the judge’s ruling that the project isn’t in keeping with county plans for the rustic area. The ruling dovetails with one nearby resident’s complaint that the county has used Trabuco Canyon as “a broom closet.”

Canyon dwellers, under assault by development, clearly don’t want to see an expanded county Probation Department presence. But the beds are needed. By 2005, the county will need an estimated 300 additional “nonsecure” beds like those at Joplin, along with 200 “secure” beds like those at Juvenile Hall in Orange, to house offenders between the ages of 12 and 17.

The county’s failure to produce a solid environmental impact report is bad news for county residents because the youth offenders who keep Joplin filled, and who would inhabit the proposed academy, represent the next generation of adult criminals.

Joplin has room for 64 teenage boys who are funneled into the facility by the Probation Department for such serious offenses as attempted murder, assault and battery, illicit drug use and vandalism. Law enforcement recognizes 351 criminal gangs in Orange County and, at this moment, about 10% have members in Joplin.

Joplin and the proposed academy are society’s chance to intervene before it’s too late. About 70% of Joplin’s residents are one-time visitors, so there’s evidence that the program works. Probation workers try to give these teens strategies to avoid potentially explosive situations--like knowing better than getting into a car and cruising a rival gang’s neighborhood with a pistol under the seat.

Joplin credits its success to putting rival gang members under the same roof and forcing them to learn to get along. Residents eat, attend classes and play basketball together at an old military barracks that has been transformed into a dormitory. The program forces potentially deadly rivals to recognize they’re more alike than most care to admit. Armed with that new knowledge, probation workers say, youthful offenders are less likely to make emotional mistakes that keep them on the wrong road.

The county should press the state to keep the grant available at least until the Probation Department determines whether it can submit an environmental impact report that won’t get thrown out of court. Failing that, the county should press forward on alternative locations. Probation officers warn that it’s a matter of society paying now or waiting until a bigger, more dangerous bill comes due.