When Los Angeles County officials opened the doors to their rebuilt juvenile hall in the San Fernando Valley three decades ago, the facility was supposed to provide a modern, safe place to house young offenders.
But by the time four teenagers jumped a wall there last week, Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall had become a grim illustration of the chaos and violence that has engulfed the county's troubled juvenile detention system.
Teachers and Probation Department staffers at the 672-bed Sylmar facility, as well as county reports, detail an institution where fights between black and Latino youths routinely escalate into racial melees.
The young inmates are kept in their cells for hours and off the recreation fields because of security concerns and a lack of adequate staffing. Suicide attempts are not uncommon, according to county records and staff members' accounts.
Inexperienced guards, many of whom have never dealt with teenage offenders, struggle to keep order even as they are called on to work double shifts. And teachers, some of whom have been assaulted, say they can't conduct classes because there aren't enough guards to keep order.
"If I was a parent and had my child in one of these institutions, I would be scared," said Charles Coleman, who has been teaching at Nidorf more than 11 years.
County leaders say they are working to fix the problems, which some say stem from years of inadequate funding. In January, the Board of Supervisors appropriated $6.5 million to boost staffing at Nidorf and the county's two other juvenile halls.
Three supervisors -- Zev Yaroslavsky, Mike Antonovich and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke -- indicated they would ask for a report on security in light of the recent escapes.
Yet Antonovich, Yaroslavsky and Burke, along with Supervisors Don Knabe and Gloria Molina, have all served on the board at least nine years and, as overseers of the county's juvenile system, have been responsible for Nidorf as conditions there deteriorated.
During that time, reports from county grand juries, federal monitors and the Probation Department have repeatedly identified problems at Nidorf and the county's other juvenile facilities.
With some 4,000 charges, the Los Angeles County juvenile detention system is now larger than the state-run system for youth offenders.
Squeezed onto 33 acres where the 5 and 210 freeways meet in the north Valley, Nidorf was not explicitly designed to rehabilitate youths held there for months on end.
