Editorial: L.A. County’s juvenile hall problem? It’s not the buildings

Nobody ought to lament the seemingly closure this summer season of Los Angeles County’s two remaining juvenile halls. Each the Barry J. Nidorf facility in Sylmar and Central Juvenile Corridor close to downtown have repeatedly failed inspections.

On the Could 23 assembly of the Board of State and Neighborhood Corrections, each complexes are anticipated to be discovered of compliance with minimal requirements and due to this fact unsuitable to proceed working. They’d be prohibited from housing juveniles starting 60 days later (though a wing of Nidorf would proceed to accommodate individuals as much as age 25 who previously would have been in state custody).

Mismanagement has led to chaotic situations at each detention facilities, the place rehabilitative and academic companies are canceled and frightened personnel keep residence. An 18-year-old died Tuesday at Nidorf of an obvious drug overdose. Not less than two different youths overdosed in April however survived. Two employees members had been stabbed.

Most of the youth will seemingly be transferred to Los Padrinos, a juvenile corridor in Downey that ceased operations in 2019 and was put to different makes use of.

The switch could be an enchancment — if the Probation Division’s downside had been solely with the buildings.

However the issue with Nidorf and Central shouldn’t be the bodily constructions. It’s the best way they’ve been mismanaged, improperly staffed and ineptly supervised. The dysfunctional administrative tradition at the moment plaguing the 2 doomed juvenile halls will merely comply with the youths to Los Padrinos.

Earlier than that facility closed in 2019, its situations had been so much like Central and Nidorf, with unprepared and typically abusive (and typically truant) employees. Detained youth slept on flooring within the overcrowded facility. State inspectors cited it for insufficient fireplace security and medical and psychological well being care.

A whole lot of individuals allege they had been sexually abused whereas in juvenile halls, together with Los Padrinos. It’s not the buildings that molested them. It was, allegedly, the staff who labored there, enabled by managers who supervised them, working beneath the tradition of impunity that abetted them.

Anybody listening to the Probation Division’s current historical past is aware of that its present issues aren’t new. For years there have been spates of worker arrests, failed inspections, threatened closures. It wasn’t the buildings.

The Board of Supervisors and different county officers focus an excessive amount of on bricks and mortar because the causes and cures for social ills, maybe as a result of buildings are comparatively straightforward to assemble and demolish.

For instance, they tried to reinvent juvenile probation by spending $48 million to renovate Camp Vernon Kilpatrick in Malibu to accommodate a brand new mannequin of rehabilitative care, utilizing intensive remedy in “home-like” residing quarters as a substitute of the military-style barracks that had been customary in probation camps.

The brand new constructing was a smashing success. Barracks aren’t conducive to rehabilitation. But the challenge was nonetheless a dismal failure, undermined by union contracts that didn’t accommodate the brand new therapeutic program and a departmental tradition that might not be torn down and rebuilt as simply as a probation camp.

Generally a constructing actually is poisonous. Males’s Central Jail, for instance, harms everybody in it with a design that promotes concern and violence. The Board of Supervisors spent too a few years arguing over what sort of constructing, relatively than what sort of companies, would change it. If the identical individuals with the identical organizational tradition function a substitute, the issues will stay.

There are classes in Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Middle, which was identified for years as “Killer King” for lethal medical ineptitude, drug theft and different worker misconduct. The issue wasn’t the constructing. It was the institutional tradition that mistreated sufferers inside.

Inspectors in 2007 discovered the medical heart out of compliance with minimal requirements and, like Nidorf and Central, unsuitable to proceed working.

The brand new Martin Luther King Jr. Neighborhood Hospital opened on the identical campus in 2015. The hospital has a brand new working construction that stops a lot of the earlier misconduct. It’s a non-public nonprofit, not a county company, and the workforce shouldn’t be lined by county civil service guidelines, which had been misplaced at a hospital. The previous hospital constructing now homes a well-regarded behavioral well being heart.

The purpose shouldn’t be that the brand new MLK hospital is the proper mannequin for reinventing juvenile probation, however that buildings alone — shuttering them, reopening them — don’t create or remedy issues which can be embedded in administration, dangerous worker contracts and poisonous organizational tradition.

These are the basis of the county’s juvenile justice issues, and reopening the previous detention heart in Downey gained’t remedy them. Any lasting resolution should break the Probation Division’s tradition to place the rehabilitation of the juveniles forward of the wants of the division managers, frontline officers and county supervisors. Till that occurs, count on juveniles and employees to proceed being injured and the Board of State and Neighborhood Corrections to intervene as soon as extra — this time, at Los Padrinos.