Dismal California Prisons Hold Juvenile Offenders

February 15, 2004
By JOHN M. BRODER

WHITTIER, Calif., Feb. 10 - The mission of the California
Youth Authority, which runs the state's 10 juvenile
prisons, housing 4,600 inmates, is to educate and
rehabilitate offenders sentenced by juvenile courts. But
state officials and outside experts brought in to study the
system say it fails in its most basic tasks, because of
antiquated facilities, undertrained employees and violence
endemic within the walls.

Youths with psychological problems are ignored or
overmedicated, classes are arbitrarily canceled, and
inmates or whole institutions are locked down for days or
weeks at a time because of recurring gang violence,
according to the independent experts, retained by the state
after it was sued two years ago in a class action brought
on inmates' behalf.

Two wards committed suicide at one prison last month, and
dozens more try to kill themselves every year, officials
and parents of wards say. Conditions in many of the
institutions were described by the experts as "deplorable,"
with blood, mucus and dried feces on the walls of many
high-security cells.

Youths in solitary confinement are often fed what officials
call "blender meals," in which a bologna sandwich, an apple
and a carton of milk are pulverized and fed to the inmate
by straw through a slit in the cell door.

The system's mental health programs are in "complete
disarray," the experts found.

"The vast majority of youths who have mental health needs,"
one report said, "are made worse instead of improved by the
correctional environment."

There are more than 4,000 serious assaults by wards on
other wards each year throughout the California juvenile
prison system, an average of more than 10 a day, according
to Dr. Barry Krisberg, a nationally recognized
criminologist who was among the experts reviewing the Youth
Authority.

"These levels of ward-on-ward and ward-on-staff assaults
are unprecedented in juvenile corrections across the
nation," Dr. Krisberg wrote in a damning report released
this month.

He said corrections leaders elsewhere were "astounded" to
hear of the prevalence of violence in California juvenile
prisons. Guards instigate fights among wards, he found, and
fail to protect those who are singled out for rapes or
beatings by other inmates.

"It is abundantly clear from a range of data that I
collected as part of this review," Dr. Krisberg wrote,
"that the Youth Authority is a very dangerous place and
that neither staff nor wards feel safe in its facilities."

He also noted that California was the only state that used
small cages, known as secure program areas, or SPA's, to
isolate prisoners from one another and from members of the
staff during instruction or counseling, a practice one
prison pastor called "demonic."

State officials newly appointed to run the Youth Authority
do not dispute most of the findings. They have promised
quick action to remedy them, starting with the elimination
of the security cages, which are in use in several of the
juvenile prisons.

State Senator Gloria Romero, a Democrat who heads a special
legislative committee overseeing the state's adult and
juvenile prison networks, called conditions in the Youth
Authority "barbaric" and "inhumane."

Senator Romero said that while the latest accounts were
shocking, there was little new in them. She said that
investigations and lawsuits over the last decade had
uncovered similar abuses and that little had been done
beyond hiring more guards and pouring vast sums of money
into the system. The state now spends $80,000 a year on
each imprisoned young offender, she said, and yet
recidivism approaches 90 percent. "On all counts," she said
of the system, "it's been a failure."

Karapet Darakchyan, an 18-year-old car thief, has been in
the juvenile prison system for three years. For more than
four months - he has not counted the days - he has been
confined to the high-security lockup at the Fred C. Nelles
Youth Correctional Facility here in Whittier, a result of
an assault on a guard last fall.

Mr. Darakchyan, a former member of the notorious White
Fence gang in East Los Angeles and a young man with an
admitted "anger problem," spends 23 hours a day in a
4-by-8-foot cell. Other than for showers, he leaves the
cell only to receive instruction or counseling, during
which he is confined inside a steel mesh cage barely big
enough to stand or turn around in.

Mr. Darakchyan, who was led from his cell in handcuffs for
a brief interview, offered no specific complaints about his
treatment at Nelles. "It's not a good place to be," he said
matter-of-factly. "It's a jail. You've got to deal with
it."

Asked whether he was receiving any useful treatment or
training, he just shook his head.

The crisis in the Youth Authority, and similar problems in
the vastly larger adult prison system, pose serious
managerial and political challenges for Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger. He has said he is "gravely concerned" about
the California prison system, which costs $6 billion a
year, and has already replaced the directors of youth and
adult corrections. He has also proposed reductions in
spending on prisons and wants to revamp the parole system
to reduce the prison population, which now exceeds 160,000.


Mr. Schwarzenegger has vowed to renegotiate a contract that
provides large raises over the next three years for prison
guards. The guards' union, the California Correctional
Peace Officers Association, which negotiated that contract
with the governor's predecessor, Gray Davis, has been a
heavy contributor to political campaigns and until now
considered politically untouchable.

Walter Allen III, the new director of the Youth Authority,
said that the reports so critical of the system were
"substantially correct" and that he had ordered his staff
to prepare remedies and a timetable for achieving them. He
also said he had retained Dr. Krisberg to advise him and
would work to settle the class-action lawsuit against his
agency.

Laura Talkington of Fresno, whose 19-year-old son, David,
has been held in Youth Authority prisons since he was
convicted of arson four years ago, makes no excuses for his
crime. But she is furious at the state for the treatment he
has received, which has included beatings by the staff and
fellow inmates. Attention deficit disorder has been
diagnosed, she said, but he has received no treatment for
it, or remedial education.

"There is no rehabilitation," Mrs. Talkington said. "There
is only punishment and a lot of abuse."

Sara Norman, a staff lawyer with the Prison Law Office, one
of the groups that brought the suit against the Youth
Authority, said inmate advocates were seeking the
appointment of a special master to ensure a top-to-bottom
overhaul of juvenile corrections in California.

"The system is completely out of control," she said. "We
don't want another blue-ribbon commission. The panel of
experts' findings are right there. The system needs to be
fixed now."

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