When Los Angeles County’s two juvenile halls repeatedly flunked inspections over the last three years, the Probation Department simply reopened a previously closed hall and moved its nearly 300 detained youths there. The sleight of hand restarted the inspection clock, bought the county some time and allowed officials to pretend that the problem they were solving was a collection of outdated buildings that weren’t up to the task of safely and securely housing young people accused of serious crimes.
But the facilities were never the problem. LA County can’t safely operate any juvenile hall because a shockingly large percentage of its probation workforce simply stays home on any given day rather than showing up for their shifts, the inspector general’s office reported last year.
Of those who do come to work, a small but significant number have been accused of grave misconduct. That includes at least 20 criminally charged with organizing fights and beatings among the young people at Los Padrinos, the reopened juvenile hall next to the department’s Downey headquarters. Dozens of officers have been dismissed or placed on leave for suspected child abuse, possession of contraband and sexual misconduct. Young inmates have overdosed on fentanyl that was smuggled onto probation campuses; one died of an overdose at the county’s juvenile hall in Sylmar in 2023.
Since Los Padrinos reopened two years ago, there have been two escapes and a riot.
The situation appears impossible — so much so that late last year, after the Board of State and Community Corrections, or BSCC, prepared to deliver a final failing grade for Los Padrinos, Chief Probation Officer Guillermo Viera Rosa announced his retirement.
He was slightly ahead of schedule. Over the last quarter century, a string of nearly a dozen LA County chief probation officers quit or were fired, an average of two years into the job.
But Viera Rosa, a former BSCC member and state parole chief, may be the county’s last best hope for fixing its probation problem, and the Board of Supervisors appeared unwilling to let him go. After a closed-door meeting with the board he agreed to stay on and try something new: Instead of restarting the inspection clock by loading hundreds of seriously troubled and dangerous kids onto buses headed for another complex, the county would simply defy the closure order while asking the state to reconsider.
What could the BSCC do? State law empowers the oversight panel to inspect juvenile (and adult facilities), and to order their closure if they are found “unsuitable” for safely housing inmates. But it grants no enforcement power.
That means the decision of whether to vacate Los Padrinos falls to the courts, but Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Miguel T. Espinoza has twice delayed his decision as he considers the alternatives.
There may not be any. Where would the youths go? What dangers would they pose to the public? How could LA County and the state meet their joint obligations to provide medical care, mental health treatment, rehabilitative services, education, recreation and safe and secure housing?
A court order to keep Los Padrinos open as the best possible option despite its inability to meet minimum health and safety standards would underscore a deep failure in the regulatory scheme. What’s the point in inspecting juvenile (or adult) jails if there are no consequences for substandard, inhumane and abusive conditions? Why bother flunking a facility if it can just keep operating?
California cedes responsibility
The state once took a much larger role in juvenile justice, operating the California Youth Authority — a state rehabilitation program that handled tougher cases deemed beyond the expertise of county probation departments.
Counties were only too happy to send youths to the state system, getting them off local streets and county balance sheets. But the youth authority eventually became an overpopulated and abusive network of violent juvenile prisons with a poor record of rehabilitation.
Legislation in 2007 made it harder and more expensive for counties to send juvenile offenders to the state system. Instead, California provided funding and sufficient flexibility to encourage counties to experiment with alternatives to juvenile incarceration.
Juvenile crime, arrests and recidivism plummeted — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not. Counties discovered more effective and efficient ways to rehabilitate youth. The youth authority became the Division of Juvenile Justice, first part of the corrections department, then health and human services.
Gov. Gavin Newson ordered the division closed altogether. It stopped accepting youths in 2021 and two years later returned the most challenging juveniles to counties to be housed along with their more traditional populations of accused and sentenced juvenile offenders. The state now focuses on funding, standard-setting and inspection.
Now some counties are struggling to manage their small but challenging populations of juveniles with serious mental health diagnoses and pending or resolved charges of horrendous crimes, including murder.
Long-standing cultural problems
Los Angeles County’s chain of failed juvenile hall inspections dates back three years, to about the same time the state stopped accepting juveniles. It’s tempting to blame LA’s dysfunction on state abdication.
But remember that long string of short-term LA chief probation officers chased out by a broken departmental culture. The roots of juvenile probation failures in the nation’s largest county run deep — far deeper than the elimination of state agencies or juvenile justice realignment.
News reports over at least three decades detail problems now quite familiar in LA halls and camps — fights between young detainees staged by stunningly irresponsible staff; drug overdoses; rampant no-shows by employees; crimes by staff unrelated to their probation duties; and allegations of rape and sexual abuse of the youths. Lawsuits by thousands of plaintiffs allege sexual abuse by Los Angeles County probation personnel dating back to the 1950s. Potential liabilities have been estimated at $3 billion, or possibly much higher.
Holding employees to acceptable standards of conduct has been nearly impossible at least since the late 1990s, when the Board of Supervisors appointed a probation union official to lead the department and signed off on the first of several labor contracts weighted so completely in favor of employees that chief probation officers lost much of their power to discipline workers for misconduct.
Viera Rosa and the Board of Supervisors have been working feverishly to sweep away the mistakes of their predecessors and hire new staff uninfected with the departmental no-show culture. But understaffed juvenile halls are dangerous places that deter new applicants from signing up, and tempt new hires to follow the pattern of veterans and simply call in sick.
California juvenile justice laws focus on transforming and reintegrating juveniles rather than punishment. Suspected offenders are governed not by the Penal Code but by the Welfare and Institutions Code. They are not “prosecuted” or “convicted” of crimes; rather, petitions against them are either sustained or not. Offenders are committed to rehabilitation programs, not punished — in theory.
But in Los Angeles County — unlike most of the state’s other 57 counties — youths who are held in juvenile halls experience the same dangerous, violent, abusive and unredemptive conditions that led the state to close the once-lauded California Youth Authority.
The one spark of good news is that judges have been sending fewer youths to juvenile halls, and counties — including Los Angeles — are slowly making more creative use of the flexibility granted under realignment, with in-home or in-community programs for supervision, education and mental health treatment. Juvenile hall populations dropped precipitously, although there has been a post-pandemic uptick.
Los Angeles County has gone a step further, creating a Department of Youth Development that one day, at least in theory, could offer non-custodial treatment and rehabilitation as an alternative to the struggling Probation Department.
But state law does not currently permit such an alternative. Bills to remedy that are pending in Sacramento, but lawmakers must decide whether to restrict the change to LA County, whose dysfunctional Probation Department culture stands apart from the other 57 counties.
For the present, the Board of State and Community Corrections still lacks the power to enforce its closure orders, and Judge Espinoza is still considering whether it is better to house hundreds of young people in decrepit conditions in violation of the state’s and county’s duty to keep them safe, secure, healthy, educated and guided. The next hearing is scheduled for April — about the same time Viera Rosa hits his two-year mark as LA County’s chief probation officer.