Juvenile Hall Is at Crisis Stage, Board Warned

Overcrowding at Ventura County’s Juvenile Hall has reached crisis proportions and will only worsen if the county cannot find the money and the will to deal with the problem, juvenile authorities told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

“The present ability of the county to adequately house, punish, train, rehabilitate and supervise its juvenile offenders is woefully inadequate,” Juvenile Court Judge Steven Z. Perren told the panel during a study session.

The most immediate problem is the need for more facilities to house the growing Juvenile Hall population, which has swelled by 114% over the last 10 years, he said. Overcrowding has created safety and liability problems for the county, he said.

But more importantly, it means that officials are unable to effectively work with youthful offenders to turn their lives around through education and counseling, Perren said.

“Our last and best chance to prevent the social predator and career criminal of tomorrow is to correct the behavior,” he said. “We do not have the facilities or the means at present to achieve that goal.

“It is your awesome responsibility to find the means and methods to meet those obligations,” Perren told the supervisors.

With the county facing a $38-million deficit, however, supervisors were unwilling Tuesday to make any financial commitments to resolving the overcrowding problem before they begin budget deliberations next month.

Responding to a proposal by probation officials, the board agreed to join two other counties in applying for a federal grant that would allow them to jointly manage a juvenile boot camp in Santa Barbara County. But in doing so, the supervisors reserved the right to bow out should the venture prove too costly for the county.

The board also refused to allocate an unexpected windfall of $600,000 in state funds for the county’s Probation Department. The panel instead shifted the money to the General Fund and said it would decide after its budget hearings how the money would be distributed.

Calvin Remington, deputy director of the Probation Department, said he was disappointed by the board’s action. He noted that employees in the Probation Department worked more than 1,000 hours of overtime in May alone.

“We are in a real crisis,” he said. “We’re not just crying wolf.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, Remington urged the board to consider a number of long-term solutions to ease overcrowding. Although Juvenile Hall is designed to hold 84 pretrial detainees, it now holds a daily average of 106 youths and is expected to reach almost 140 by the year 2000.

Remington recommended creating day treatment programs and expanding the monitoring of juvenile offenders through the use of electronic ankle bracelets to help deal with the problem in the near term.

Another plan would be to convert an adult minimum-security facility at the Camarillo Airport--part of the sheriff’s work-furlough program--to a juvenile boot camp. This would require transferring work-furlough inmates to the new Todd Road Jail.

But Remington said it would be costly to convert the facility to a boot camp, noting that it would require special fencing and surveillance cameras to meet state regulations.

He said the most realistic--and most expensive--solution would be for the county to begin planning for the development of a new $20-million juvenile justice center, which would house under one roof a juvenile hall, courts and probation offices.