Serious Problems Festering in Juvenile Justice System Require Serious Reforms

When Alan Feaster said goodbye to his 18-year-old son, Durrell, at the Preston training school run by the California Youth Authority, he never thought it would be for the last time. Just weeks later, in January, his son was dead, the victim of an apparent double suicide with his cellmate, acts of desperation that in all likelihood were connected to conditions our state has allowed to fester in its prisons for troubled youth.

Durrell's death may seem like an isolated incident, but the horrific conditions in the CYA are more the rule than the exception. As California policymakers struggle to reform our system of juvenile justice, they need to focus on systematic reforms, the kind that won't just paper over problems but would end the system's abuses once and for all.

Just a few weeks after the two boys' deaths, a panel of experts reported on the deplorable conditions at CYA facilities. They found excessive rates of violence; inadequate mental health care and educational services; overuse of isolation cells; and deplorable conditions, including feces spread all over some of the cells. Some boys were being forced to sit or stand in cages while attending classes, a "normal" situation in the state's Kafkaesque system.

Just as shocking as the litany of CYA abuses is the fact that institutions such as Preston Training School simply don't work. A growing body of research shows that young people incarcerated in large institutions get rearrested more frequently, and for more serious crimes than their counterparts with similar delinquency histories who are not incarcerated.

For example, a study that compared matched samples of offenders in Arkansas found that the incarceration experience was the single greatest predictor of future criminal conduct, dwarfing the effects of gang membership or family dysfunction.

It's not surprising then, that more than nine out of 10 CYA "graduates" are back in trouble with the law within three years of their release. On top of that, the CYA system costs taxpayers a whopping $85,000 a year per youth. It seems likely that if the majority of CYA youths came from white, middle-class neighborhoods, the public would never stand for its failures and abuses.

Fortunately, there is a better way to respond to youth crime than by confining young people in dungeon-like prisons. Last week, a network of experts, advocates, concerned parents and young people issued a platform that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Legislature and the governor's recently created Task Force on the California Youth Authority would do well to adopt.