Revamp of CYA Slow to Occur

Jerry Harper says he knows what the California Youth Authority needs. After all, he ran it from 2000 until December.

Hired to reform the troubled penal system for the state’s worst juvenile offenders, Harper began with high hopes. But, he says, promises of more money, more staff and better facilities never materialized.

“The solutions are simple.... Frankly we just have to implement them. State government is incapable of effective follow-through,” he says. “California should be ashamed of the Youth Authority.”

The Youth Authority is coming under fire in a slew of new reports that say the system fails to adequately protect young offenders from being terrorized or hurt while in prison -- criticisms similar to those leveled at the agency in reports going as far back as the late 1980s.

Over the years, the Legislature has responded with statements of outrage. Hearings have been held and reforms urged. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has put a new man in charge of the Youth Authority and declared its problems appalling. But the challenges remain.

Speaking from his home in Palmdale last week, Harper described how his efforts to revamp the agency foundered amid obstacles, and he took some of the blame for what happened. The former Los Angeles County undersheriff said that some of the criticism was overstated, but that it was the state’s politicians, with few exceptions, who failed to deliver on promises of additional staff and money. And when they did deliver, bureaucratic constraints continued to stall progress, he said.

Year after year, the California Youth Authority sought reforms that experts said were urgently needed to fix the state’s youth prisons. And year after year, he said, California failed to carry them out.

The reports are related to negotiations over a lawsuit recently filed by the Prison Law Office against the CYA alleging a smorgasbord of ills, from inadequate mental health services to excessively harsh practices for controlling violent inmates.

The lawsuit represents a bitter coda to Harper’s term: For years, CYA insiders have argued that if the state didn’t move faster to fix the system, advocates would sue. It didn’t. And they did.

Critics differ on the extent to which the CYA’s current problems are the fault of its leaders, threadbare funding, or political indifference. But many seem to agree with Harper’s contention that the CYA could have been fixed long ago had the state had the will to make it happen.

Just why it has been so difficult to marshal support for changing the CYA puzzles even those with years of experience with the troubled agency. “I am not exactly sure why things are so slow and so disorganized,” said Sue Burrell, a Youth Law Center attorney who has been one of the CYA’s most consistent critics.

Sporadic scandals have triggered, “a bunch of big fat reports,” she said. “But no one took the recommendations and translated them into action.”

Harper’s account of his 3 1/2 years at the agency’s helm sheds light on some of the factors that have blocked reforms.

Although the craggy-featured 62-year-old Harper argues that more progress has been made than outsiders suggest, he concedes that conditions remain far worse than they should be.

The inertia was so great, Harper said, that he sometimes half wished for the kind of sweeping lawsuit that has since been filed, if only to compel political leaders to act.

Such lawsuits have helped drive reforms in California’s adult prisons. But the Youth Authority historically drew little attention of this sort, said Burrell. Overshadowed by the enormous Department of Corrections, and home to just 3% of the state’s juvenile inmates, it was easily eclipsed by higher priority causes.

When Harper started his term, he contends, practices and procedures varied so widely from institution to institution, technology was so antiquated, and information so scarce that it was all but impossible to put any change in motion.

No one knew such basic facts as how many inmates were in lockdown, Harper said. There was no system for tracking violence among inmates, either -- despite the fact that the agency had been faulted for this problem since the 1980s.

To this day, it remains impossible to say whether rates of assaults in the CYA are up or down from past years, said Barry Krisberg, a consultant who wrote a recent critical report. Meanwhile, Harper said, the CYA’s budget request for technical systems to better track data was delayed.

Other reform efforts were stalled due to chronic understaffing, he said. Efforts to eliminate controversial cages used in lockdown facilities to educate inmates, for example, were foiled because there weren’t enough teachers to instruct inmates in groups of one or two. Nor were there enough guards to monitor classrooms.

So these inmates continue to be educated in groups of five or six, separated from one another by metal cages.

Yet money was not always the problem. Harper said red tape often proved insurmountable, derailing efforts to hire more psychologists to treat the CYA’s high percentage of mentally ill young inmates, for instance.

Advocates had sued the agency over licensing of its mental health services, and two expert reports commissioned by the CYA confirmed the need for more mental health professionals, Harper said. But the state delayed action for two years. Then, when it finally approved hiring funds, the finance department would not approve exemptions to a hiring freeze then in place, Harper said. So much of the money sat idle.

Meanwhile, the ranks of CYA psychologists actually shrank. At the time, the state’s adult prisons were also under pressure to hire psychologists. So they lured away the one at CYA. Harper calls this example -- one state agency draining the resources of another -- evidence that, “the state is its own worst enemy.”

Harper contends that his term was not without successes. In particular, he said, efforts to reduce use of lockdown, and revamp use-of-force policies brought progress.

Improper use of force was a top concern four years ago. In some highly publicized cases, inmates were forced to kneel for hours on gym floors in handcuffs in a practice ostensibly used to control violence. But more recently, Krisberg’s review concluded that, although problems with certain practices remain, physical abuse of inmates by staff is not a widespread or systemic problem in the CYA.

CYA critics and youth advocates offered varied assessments of Harper’s term. His slow progress and failure to galvanize political momentum means the newly appointed CYA director, Walter Allen, enters the job facing many of the same reform demands Harper faced. And, he points out, new funds may be even harder to come by now, especially since the CYA’s population has declined.

But Burrell, the youth advocate, credits Harper with “building a structure,” that will make it easier to move ahead.

Krisberg, the consultant, also gave Harper high marks, calling him one of the best directors the CYA has had in decades. “He inherited a system in total collapse ... and made real progress,” he said. “To say that the CYA is screwed up and they’ve got to fix it is not the story.... There is plenty of fault to go around,” he said.

Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, said Harper should be judged on the poor conditions that persist in the institutions, however. “It is hard for me to judge what [he] did or didn’t do, but if you were to grade this now, you would give the CYA an F,” he said.

Yet Specter also echoed some of Harper’s conclusions. “I think the state is incapable of providing lawful correctional facilities on its own,” he said. “It’s almost part of the way California government is set up. They can’t even get a new computer program without going through two state agencies. They can’t blink without unions approving it. And to pass a regulation takes an act of God.”

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Times staff writers Nora Zamichow and Jia-Rui Chong contributed to this report.