For more than a decade, Los Angeles County's governing supervisors have been repeatedly warned about problems in the county's mammoth detention system for juvenile offenders.
But despite at least 16 studies, investigations or audits since 1998 -- exposing serious deficiencies with schooling, mental health services and basic safety -- the county's elected leaders have done little to meaningfully improve California's largest juvenile detention system, records show.
Instead, outside observers say, the supervisors' pattern of crisis-driven leadership coupled with poor follow-through has left a system, housing nearly 4,000 offenders on any given day, in much the same woeful condition as 10 years ago.
In the last year, county juvenile facilities operated by the Probation Department have erupted in race riots. More than a dozen inmates have escaped. And federal monitors have found mentally ill juveniles shackled hand and foot for days on end.
"Anyone who works in government knows that what gets paid attention to gets done," said Elan Melamid, a public policy consultant who has studied the county's delinquency and child welfare systems, as well as New York's -- where, he said, dogged leadership turned around a disastrous system.
"It's no secret that this Board of Supervisors tends to be quite flighty," Melamid said. "And bureaucrats know that if you duck long enough, they'll move along to the next crisis."
The supervisors generally defend their oversight of the juvenile system, citing the difficulties of dealing with violent delinquents.
"We just have a very tough population in a big county," Supervisor Don Knabe said recently.
As hopeful signs, Knabe and his colleagues point to recently approved funding to boost staffing at the juvenile halls and the appointment of a probation chief who has promised to tackle the system's problems aggressively.
"There's a lot of work going on right now," said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is in his 12th year on the board.
There is much to do. Studies over the last year have exposed many of the same deficiencies identified nearly a decade ago, some as basic as proper recordkeeping.
Even the tragedies -- and the response from the Board of Supervisors -- seem to have changed little.
