Spare a Bright Spot

Last Friday, the Camp Kilpatrick Mustangs beat the Windward Wildcats at a basketball tournament at Malibu High School. Uniforms aside, it was hard to distinguish the behavior of the Wildcats -- the privileged children of an elite Westside school -- from that of the Mustangs -- robbers, vandals, thieves, substance abusers and other wards of a “camp” run by Los Angeles County’s probation department.

One reason why California’s entire correctional system is such a shambles is that it has largely discarded the notion of rehabilitation. The members of the Mustang team are exceptions. They and other wards at Camp Kilpatrick, a razor-wire-enclosed facility in Malibu, follow a structured routine aimed at teaching them how to succeed after they are released. They comply or risk being sent to a juvenile facility with fewer opportunities. As the Mustangs’ coach, Shon Tarver, puts it, if they can regain some control over their lives, they may leave the system able to cope in ordinary society rather than as graduates of a school for criminals.

That bright spot in the correctional system may soon be extinguished by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to terminate the $134 million in yearly funding for probation camps and related county-based programs for juvenile offenders. The interest group with the most to gain from the camps’ closure is the prison guards union, whose members staff the brutal California Youth Authority prisons where many of the wards would be sent instead. The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. derides the county facilities as “summer camps.”

That caricature is far off base. While Youth Authority inmates spend most of their time in cells or cages, constantly on alert for violent attacks, probation camp inmates spend five hours a day in school. In other hours they help cook their own meals, clean up their grounds and, at some camps, assist in fighting wildfires. Housing a youth offender in a camp for a year costs $36,000, compared with $80,000 in the Youth Authority, so shuttering the camps would not help alleviate California’s budget woes.

A far better course would be to eliminate the 10% pay raise that legislators irresponsibly plan to give the prison guards in the coming year (on top of the 7% raise the guards got last year, on top of salaries already far higher than those of guards in all other states).

The union’s lobbyists are pressuring Sens. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) and Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), who plan a hearing on the raises next week. If the guards succeed in intimidating legislators, their raises will cost Californians more than half a billion dollars a year by 2006. Despite what the union argues, future raises are not set in law. Speier and Romero should not give in to the lobbying.

When the state does something more productive with teenage offenders than throw them into a violent prison, they have a chance of coming out the other end more proud of their free-throw shots and reading skills than new criminal abilities.