Los Angeles County’s two largest juvenile detention facilities, at risk of closure for failing to meet minimum standards of safety and care, won a last-minute reprieve Thursday, April 11, when state regulators allowed them to remain open.
The Board of State and Community Corrections, the regulatory board overseeing California’s prisons and juvenile halls, voted to lift its “unsuitable” designation for both Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey and the Barry J. Nidorf Secure Youth Treatment Facility in Sylmar.
Both facilities could have been forced to shut down April 16 because of failed inspections over the past year, though no backup plan existed to relocate the hundreds of youths housed there.
“No way should this be considered by anybody in our virtual audience, or in this room, as ‘Mission Accomplished’ by L.A.,” said BSCC chair Linda Penner, the former chief probation officer for Fresno County. “Your mission now is sustainability and durability. We need continued compliance.”
The vote passed by a much more narrow margin than is typical for the board, with only six of the 13 board members offering support. Three voted against it, saying they did not believe Los Angeles County could maintain improvements at the facilities long-term. The other four abstained or recused themselves.
“I have a very difficult time agreeing that Los Angeles County has established suitable facilities that I would trust having my family members in,” said Brian Richart, chief probation officer for El Dorado County.
‘Made great strides’
In a statement, L.A. County Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa said his department has “made great strides addressing deficiencies at facilities by increasing and stabilizing staff levels, providing hundreds of hours of additional training, and working closely with BSCC staff to tighten procedures and protocols.”
“While today’s BSCC decision marks a milestone in that effort, we note the ongoing concerns and acknowledge there’s still much more to be done,” he stated. “The County remains fully committed to transforming its juvenile justice facilities into the safest, most nurturing environments possible for the youth committed to our care.”
The same board previously declared Los Padrinos and Barry J. Nidorf “unsuitable” in February, kicking off a 60-day countdown to either bring the facilities back up to the state’s minimum standards, or shut down. The BSCC’s staff recommended reversing that decision after follow-up inspections in early April found that the county had addressed previously identified failings in staffing, training and policy and was now meeting the state’s minimum standards in those categories.
Can improvements be sustained?
But at Thursday’s meeting, those same staff voiced concern that Los Angeles County cannot sustain those improvements, particularly when it comes to staffing. The department redeployed 250 officers from its adult field services division to bolster its number at the juvenile halls shortly before the reinspections. Critics compared the redeployments to a “Band-Aid” and a class-action lawsuit has been filed to challenge the mandate.
“I don’t necessarily have the confidence that they’ll continue long-term since the (staffing) numbers we saw from several weeks ago didn’t look the same,” said Allison Ganter, the BSCC’s deputy director for facilities standards and operations. “Given past experience, I would say I don’t have a lot of confidence. Given the most recent numbers, I have hope.”
Figures provided to the board by Kimberly Epps, chief deputy of the county Probation Department, suggested about 40% of the staff at the juvenile halls had been redeployed from elsewhere.
BSCC board member and San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said while the reassignments allowed Los Angeles County to, at least temporarily, meet minimum staffing requirements at the juvenile halls, he still has “grave concerns” about the risks it poses to public safety.
“At the end of the day, there’s still a public safety problem that’s being mishandled by Los Angeles County by not having the field staff doing their day-to-day job,” he said.
The board ultimately declared Los Padrinos and Barry J. Nidorf “suitable” to continuing house youths only after receiving assurances that staff would perform “targeted and unannounced” inspections at both facilities on a monthly basis until a more comprehensive inspection could take place later this year.
Follow-up inspections
If Los Angeles County fails those follow-up inspections, the BSCC’s counsel told the members he believed — though it would be unprecedented — they could quickly declare the facilities “unsuitable” again without having to go through the entire seven-month process again.
Inspectors spent 13 days in Los Angeles County reviewing documentation, talking with youth and verifying the changes L.A. County made, according to Penner, the board’s chair.
“We cannot deny the fact that when we went in to verify and find evidence of compliance, we found it,” Penner told her fellow board members before the vote. “And I don’t think we can ignore that at this juncture.”
Reform advocates were not surprised by the decision. Two of Los Angeles County’s former juvenile halls were found “unsuitable” in 2021, but those facilities also managed to avoid closure for two more years by making just enough improvements to reset the process. The state closed those facilities last year and left Los Angeles County with no choice but to relocate hundreds of youth to Los Padrinos, which had been closed years earlier.
‘Real fixes’ needed
Sean Garcia-Leys, the co-executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center, said the juvenile hall needs “real fixes, not temporary Band-Aids.”
“The facilities have definitely improved but the evidence I’ve seen shows that kids still don’t receive an hour a day of programming and no one believes the department can keep pulling hundreds of probation officers away from their other jobs to work in the facilities,” he said.
He expressed disappointment in the board’s decision. The Peace and Justice Law Center plans to conduct a private audit to try to determine “why the board has reversed itself and decided a few weeks of compliance with standards outweigh the years of failure to meet minimum standards.”
“For the last several inspections, the board strictly enforced the minimum standards and demanded authentic fixes to the problems they found,” Garcia-Leys said. “But now, when the stakes are highest, the board has changed its practice and decided that temporarily meeting minimum standards is good enough. It isn’t.”
‘We’ll be back’
Aditi Sherikar, a senior policy associate with Children’s Defense Fund California, said the BSCC spent much of the meeting talking about what it will do if Los Angeles falls out of compliance again.
“It shows that even they don’t believe L.A. can stay in compliance,” she said. “L.A. youth will continue to suffer and we’ll be back here in a few months probably.”
Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger expressed confidence in the department in a statement Thursday night. The BSCC’s decision, she said, “is a testament to the hard work that our County’s Probation Department, under new leadership, has put in to improve the care youth are receiving at two challenging sites.”
“The work is far from over,” she said, “but we are headed in the right direction.”
