SACRAMENTO — One year after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed to make the state's youth prisons places where inmates receive "a better chance to succeed in life," his administration Wednesday released a court-mandated plan to carry out that vision, outlining a therapeutic approach that has proved successful elsewhere in the country.
The long-awaited blueprint proposes cutting in half the number of youths housed together, changing how guards handle unruly wards, ensuring that all receive therapy, eliminating extended solitary confinement for misbehavior, and more carefully screening incoming juveniles so they are housed and treated according to their needs.
It also suggests transferring California's 155 female wards into secure residential programs and says reform will probably be impossible unless the state closes its "decrepit" youth lock-ups and opens new or renovated facilities that are state of the art.
Though supportive of the principles at the heart of the plan, lawyers, legislators and relatives of young offenders called it skimpy on details. They also lamented that neither the document, nor the officials unveiling it, mentioned how much the changes would cost and where money to accomplish the task would be found.
"The state worked hard on this plan, and I know their intentions are good," said Donald Specter of the Prison Law Office, the nonprofit firm that sued the state over its management of juvenile corrections. "But there are too many unanswered questions for us to feel confident that we will eventually have a system that keeps kids safe and protects the public."
Specter said he and other attorneys were so disappointed by the lack of specifics that they considered filing a motion seeking to hold state officials in contempt of court for violating a settlement agreement, reached last year, in which Schwarzenegger vowed to make reforms.
Instead, Specter said, the Prison Law Office and state struck an agreement late Wednesday requiring the state to hire by Jan. 3 six national juvenile justice experts. The team, which will include the former youth prison chiefs of Massachusetts and Illinois, will help make immediate changes inside prisons and fine-tune the long-term plan, he said.
The clash over the beleaguered youth system comes as Schwarzenegger faces intense criticism for another aspect of his massive corrections department: a lack of progress on fixing profound problems with medical care for the state's 168,000 adult prisoners.
