LA County probation officials want to close more juvenile facilities, shuffle youth

The Los Angeles County Probation Department wants to close two more juvenile facilities and shuffle dozens of youth across its footprint in an effort to consolidate staff and further reduce the population at the struggling Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, but the proposal unveiled this week has sparked concerns the shift could instead destabilize the rest of the county’s juvenile system.

Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa presented his vision for the future to the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Feb. 18, and received almost immediate pushback from board members and advocates who viewed it as half-baked. Supervisors questioned Viera Rosa’s decision to develop the proposal without input from other stakeholders, including the county departments that supply teachers, social workers and services to the juvenile facilities and would need to make their own adjustments.

“I’m interested in your vision, but I’m wondering if this is the right time to be really serious about a global plan of facilities construction, renovation, moving huge numbers of populations around when we are struggling with staffing issues,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn. “A lot of what you are proposing would cause a lot of disruption to the young people in our care.”

Viera Rosa, in response to criticisms, stressed his plan is a starting point to elicit feedback. Other departments and community members will get a chance to weigh in before it is brought back, he said, but the county has deferred work on a long-term plan for too long.

“If I waited for unanimity by department heads, or this board, it would be five years from now,” Viera Rosa shot back at one point.

A handful of those department heads sat behind Viera Rosa during his presentation and made it clear, through their facial expressions, that they hadn’t been consulted, prompting Supervisor Kathryn Barger to joke that they were “lousy poker players.” Barger urged the probation chief to include them in the next round, but stressed her colleagues needed to let him “put the meat on the bone” before shooting down his ideas.

“If we don’t give clear direction, or the ability for our chief probation officer to make a determination, based on what we hired him for as a subject expert, then we’re going to be back here next year having the same discussion,” Barger said. “I just don’t think that’s what we want.”

The supervisors did not take any formal action on the plan and have asked Viera Rosa to further develop it, with more input from stakeholders, before bringing it back in early April.

Though much of the Viera Rosa’s vision is not set in stone, the department does intend to permanently close Camp Joseph Paige in La Verne and the former Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, a facility now used as a hub for medical services, by the end of April.

The roughly 30 youth at Camp Paige would shift to either Camp Afflerbaugh, located on the same property, or Camp Glenn Rockey in San Dimas, while employees and service providers would be divvied up among all of the county’s juvenile facilities as needed, according to Viera Rosa.

Thomas Bell, who represents the camps for the Los Angeles County Deputy Probation Officers’ Union, urged probation to reconsider during public comment.

“How are we going to have a small community if we close the camp that deals with the older minors, older juvenile youth and throw them into the other camps, making them larger?” Bell said. “The camps are working. If you do that, the camps won’t work.”

Other parts of the plan remained a work in progress.

Perhaps the most controversial part would empty Campus Kilpatrick, a facility in the Santa Monica Mountains often touted as the flagship for the county’s “L.A. Model” for rehabilitation. The campus houses about 20 young men and is often praised for having a home-like environment where youth get a level of autonomy and responsibility that isn’t possible at the larger facilities. Placements at Kilpatrick are highly sought by both youth and staff due to its stability in a system otherwise plagued by constant turmoil.

“Transferring boys out of Kilpatrick, a camp that was literally designed to meet their needs, is like pulling the rug out from beneath them,” said DeAnna Pittman, program manager with the Young Women’s Freedom Center.

Eduardo Mundo, chair of the county’s Probation Oversight Commission and a former probation supervisor, agreed.

“You’re taking away one of the better programs that we have for the secure youth track kids,” he said. “It doesn’t seem well thought out.”

Under Viera Rosa’s proposal, Kilpatrick would stop taking new youth in June and would empty naturally by August. Those who would have been sent to Kilpatrick will instead go to the Secure Youth Treatment Facility (SYTF) at the former Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar. The Nidorf campus, home to about 90 currently, would evolve over the next two years into a series of specialized smaller communities, such as a college academy or a step-down facility where youth could transition to less restrictive housing, including potentially to small, prefabricated homes, based on their progress and behavior, according to Viera Rosa.

“We need to create space for the young SYTF population at Nidorf to see that they have options in front of them beyond the restrictive environments that they have when they first go to the facility,” he said.

Once Kilpatrick is empty, Probation would transfer all of the girls and gender expansive youth in its custody — about 50 total — onto the campus, to be renamed as the Campus Kilpatrick Client Assessment, Readiness & Engagement (CARE) Center, by the end of the year. That move would reduce Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall’s population by about 30, bringing its total down to around 200, if it stays consistent, and may ease some of the staffing issues experienced there.

The other 20 girls would come from the Dorothy Kirby Center, which would instead focus on providing mental health and special needs services to boys and young men in the department’s custody.

The potential change to Kilpatrick drew a flurry of questions from the supervisors that Viera Rosa could not to answer yet. The supervisors questioned whether the location would make it more difficult for family to visit and whether it would create strain on staff to have to ferry youth from the Santa Monica Mountains to court cases elsewhere. Kilpatrick, as it is currently, only houses youth with adjudicated cases, but under the new proposal, about 30 of the girls would be “predisposition,” meaning their cases are active and ongoing.

Such a move is likely to face outside opposition, too. Residents in Malibu have historically come out against increases to the population at Kilpatrick and the proposal would more than double the number of youth on site.

The Probation Department has spent years putting out constant fires, most recently related to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall. The facility, ordered to close by state regulators over its substandard conditions back in December, remains open in defiance of state law.

Under his proposal, Viera Rosa imagines a restructuring of Los Padrinos, the county’s only juvenile hall, that splits it into two separate halves. One would hold youth expected to stay in the facility for less than 30 days, while the other would be for longer stays and focus on “reducing recidivism and fostering resilience,” according to Viera Rosa.

That would allow the county to provide educational and mental health services, for example, that are tailored to the needs of the differing groups, he said.

The plan, however, requires the troubled facility to undergo construction while it is in operation, with youth being shifted from one side, to the other, depending on where the construction is taking place. Viera Rosa told the supervisors that work is necessary and must take place — whether they approve of his plan or not — because of the facility’s age.

A report estimated the construction could take up to three years.

The same state regulators that declared Los Padrinos “unsuitable” to house youth would need to sign off on the move to Kilpatrick and potentially on the structural changes to Los Padrinos.

The state found Los Padrinos unsuitable last year after it repeatedly failed inspections as a result of its inability to properly staff the juvenile hall. The county has refused to comply with the order to close, prompting a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge to drag the county, the District Attorney’s Office and the public defender into court to address why the facility shouldn’t be shuttered.

The proposal to move the girls out of Los Padrinos to Kilpatrick comes after two months of court testimony in which probation officials suggested moving youth from Los Padrinos to the county’s other facilities would not be feasible.

Judge Miguel Espinoza, who has expressed worry about destabilizing other facilities by forcing the department to move youth, has delayed a decision three times now. Espinoza’s delays came, in part, out of a desire to see how two ongoing reviews by the Board of State and Community Corrections, the agency that oversees California’s juvenile halls, played out.

L.A. County tried to appeal the BSCC’s findings during a reinspection in December, but the BSCC rejected that appeal on the same day that Viera Rosa gave his presentation to the supervisors. In a letter, Aaron Maguire, the BSCC’s acting executive director, concluded that its inspectors “correctly assessed that, at the time of the inspection, Los Padrinos did not have an adequate number of personnel sufficient to carry out the overall facility operation and its programming, to provide for safety and security of youth and staff, and meet established standards and regulations.”

A separate reinspection of the facility, conducted in early February, is still ongoing, according to the BSCC.