SAN LUIS OBISPO — Jails, it turns out, are not like mousetraps. Just because you build a better one, that doesn't mean the world will beat a path to your cell door.
Take the Turning Point Academy, set among the rolling green hills of the National Guard's Camp San Luis Obispo. Officials with the residential detention center for juveniles like to say they've combined the best elements of boot camp discipline with the best ideas from the therapeutic, educational model for handling criminal youths.
"We've put together an excellent program. We have an excellent staff and an excellent location," said Col. Mike Nevin, the academy's commandant.
The only thing they don't have is inmates, or cadets, as they are known here.
To be fair, they do have one. Known as the $9-million kid, because that's how much it costs to operate the academy, he is a skinny, soft-spoken 16-year-old from Shasta County who was sent here for taking a gun to school. He sleeps alone in a dormitory on the second floor of the stucco barracks building. Lining the wall alongside his neatly made bed are 19 empty bunks. Next to the desk on which he does his homework at night are 19 empty desks. When he plays basketball during recreation periods, he plays alone.
"It gets lonely at times," he said Thursday during a break from working on the computer in an empty classroom. But he hastened to add that Turning Point would be "an excellent academy for anybody like me."
With a staff-cadet ratio of 45 to 1, it should be.
Everyone agrees that something's not working at Turning Point; they're just not sure what it is. Some suggest that Juvenile Court judges throughout the state don't know it is available as an alternative to juvenile hall and the traditional march-and-scream boot camps. More conspiratorial observers envision a dark plot by enemies in the Legislature to design the program to fail by making it so restrictive that few can qualify. The academy accepts only first-time offenders, 15 to 17, caught taking a gun to school or a school event.
All that is certain is that a lot of work has been done and much money spent to create a model juvenile justice program nobody is using. A barracks built in 1993 has been outfitted to accommodate 160 young people, and construction is scheduled to update World War II-era buildings for use as a dining hall and an administration office.
