SAN FRANCISCO — In a sweeping condemnation of the juvenile corrections system, auditors concluded Monday that the California Youth Authority is failing to give offenders the education and training that could save them from a life of crime.
The state's youth prisons are still confining too many wards for 23 hours a day, the audit found, calling the practice "ineffective and dehumanizing."
The Office of the Inspector General even found that 27 youths at a Chino detention facility were locked up around the clock, except for five-minute daily showers. And 39 youths at a Stockton facility were locked down for more than 30 days, with three kept in their cells for more than 200 days.
Numerous other wards, the audit found, were receiving little in the way of required teaching and counseling designed to help prepare them for their eventual release.
Auditors found that the CYA had failed to adequately address 43% of the problems identified in previous audits since 2000. "Most troubling," said Inspector General Matthew L. Cate, "is that many of the deficiencies that have not been corrected are central to the Youth Authority's core mission of rehabilitating the young people entrusted to its care."
While noting that the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger inherited almost all of the problems, Cate called on officials to take immediate action to halt the downward spiral of a system responsible for 3,588 youthful offenders.
CYA Director Walter Allen III, who was appointed last year, said in a teleconference that the report "validates what we have known for more than a year.... That CYA is an outdated system in crisis that needs a major overhaul."
Allen said that he already has made wholesale changes in the beleaguered agency's top management and promised to use the audit as a tool for further improvements. "There is no way of taking 25 to 30 years of problems and changing them in six months or a year," he said.
The CYA has been repeatedly criticized for its violence, poor healthcare and failure to reduce a repeat offender rate of 70%.
In November, Schwarzenegger announced an overhaul as part of a settlement of a civil rights lawsuit brought by the nonprofit Prison Law Office in San Rafael.
The settlement requires the state to develop plans to improve many CYA operations, including its management of gangs, treatment of the mentally ill and use of force by staff.
