Girls Convicted as Adults Serve Time in Solitary

Noemi has been in the county jail’s discipline unit for months. But unlike the women around her, she was not sent to solitary confinement because she was deemed out of control.

In Noemi’s case, her problem is not her behavior but her age: She is 17.

Noemi is part of a wave of juveniles who are being sent to answer for their crimes in adult court and sentenced to serve their time in adult institutions. And Noemi, whose last name is being withheld because of her age, presents a problem for sheriff’s officials, who run the county jails.

The law requires underage offenders to be kept separate from adults. Though judges remand enough boys to the county jail to warrant their own cellblock, girls are few and far between.

So jailers improvise. Whenever girls are sent to them for incarceration--several times a year--officials put them in solitary confinement, a move that satisfies the legal requirement to keep the children separate but that imposes far more difficult conditions on the young inmates than they would otherwise face.

It is their only legal option, sheriff’s officials said in interviews last week.

Children’s rights advocates complain that the conditions are inappropriate.

“It’s a dungeon,” Javier Stauring, director of the juvenile detention ministry of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said of the discipline ward. “It’s a depressing, deplorable place.”

A children’s advocate who has taken up Noemi’s case says the conditions are also illegal, charging that jailers are not meeting her educational, recreational or hygienic requirements and have denied her access to over-the-counter drugs, citing her age. She also says that Noemi--who was convicted of robbing a woman on the street and who accepted the jail time as part of a plea bargain--has verbal and occasionally physical contact with adult inmates anyway, and that the inmates she encounters in the area of the jail where she is held are particularly dangerous.

“Ironically, in attempting to segregate [her] from the adult population, the jail administration has exposed her to the most dangerous or disturbed inmates in the facility,” Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center, wrote Sheriff Lee Baca. “Contact with these inmates is exactly the harm that juvenile/adult separation requirements were designed to prevent.”

She said Noemi is alone in her cell about 23 hours a day.

Sheriff’s officials dispute that. They say Noemi is alone in her cell no more than 21 hours a day and gets everything she’s entitled to: three hours of recreation a week, showers every other day, teacher visits and access to a nurse. They deny that she communicates with the adult inmates around her, but acknowledge that she can hear them when they scream.

“She is the only juvenile we have in the facility. We have to make sure she’s safe. This is the safest place,” said sheriff’s Capt. John Franklin, who oversees the Twin Towers Jail. “It puts us in a bind because we have to give her constant security.”

That means calling deputies from other areas whenever she moves from place to place, removing other inmates from hallways, showers, a television room or the roof-top recreation area.

Eastlake Juvenile Judge Rudy Diaz said he’s not concerned about the legality of her conditions, but he’s worried about their psychological effects.

“The problem is, essentially, that she’s isolated. She’s doing hard time,” said Diaz, who inspected the facility last month.

Noemi said that after advocates took up her case, deputies began giving her more time out of her cell, allowing her to watch an entire movie, rather than just an hour alone in the television room, for example.

To pass the hours in her cell, she plays cards, draws, reads the novels and the assignments dropped off by a visiting teacher each week, and talks to the women around her.

She said deputies at times threaten to write up the women who talk to her, and they have posted a paper sign on her door: “No inmate contact.”

“That’s like showing a mouse a piece of cheese and saying: You can’t get it,” she complained. “How can they house me somewhere and expect them not to talk to me?”

In contrast, Noemi’s sister, who committed the same crime and received the same sentence, is in regular housing, working in the kitchen and living a more normal life--to the degree that incarceration is normal.

“She’s being punished for being under 18,” Stauring, of the archdiocese, said of Noemi. “I don’t see why they can’t just let girls do their time here at juvenile hall.”

Franklin, of the Sheriff’s Department, wonders the same thing. Because the judge gave her a jail term, he said he doesn’t have authority to transfer her to juvenile hall.

Noemi’s arrest in July was her first, according to her lawyer and court files, but her case was sent to adult court because of the seriousness of the allegations.

Armed with a screwdriver, Noemi, her sister and another girl robbed a woman in Downey. When the victim wouldn’t let go of her purse, they assaulted her with a Mace-like spray.

In a report to the court, a probation officer said that if she were sentenced to prison, he thought she should be housed in the California Youth Authority, the state’s prison for minors, because of “her tender years.”

Noemi instead made a deal with prosecutors for three years’ probation and a year in jail--the same deal taken by her sister and friend, according to Noemi and her lawyer.

At the time, nobody considered that Noemi’s time would be served in solitary confinement, said her defense lawyer, Andy Stein.

“No judge would sentence her to that,” Stein said. He said he intends to file a motion asking the judge who sentenced Noemi to order her housed in juvenile hall instead.