Governor’s plan to end juvenile justice system raises questions

In his first week as California’s governor, Gavin Newsom vowed to “end the juvenile justice system as we know it,” a statement that set current members of that system on edge.

“The Division of Juvenile Justice has been a troubled entity in the past, so maybe this is the next step in the evolution,” Karen A. Pank, executive director for the Chief Probation Officers of California, said in an interview Friday. “But you need to do it in a way that doesn’t endanger the successes we’ve been having at the local level.”

Newsom, who made his comments at last week’s budget unveiling, said he would release a detailed plan later on how he intends to dismantle the system. “I want to make a separate announcement because I think it’s a big deal,” he said at a news conference.

There were some clues in the budget proposal. For example, the governor proposed moving the Division of Juvenile Justice from the corrections department to a new department within the Health and Human Services Agency to “enable the state to better provide youth offenders with the services they need to be successful when released.” He also proposed allocating $2 million to match a federal grant dedicated to juvenile reentry programs.

“A critical component of a well-functioning correctional system is providing offenders greater opportunity for rehabilitation,” Newsom wrote in the budget’s introduction. “This starts with the youngest offenders. The administration proposes to transform its youth correctional facilities to focus on rehabilitation and education.”

According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the corrections department oversees a small population of juveniles incarcerated at three facilities. Despite declines in juvenile arrests overall, the Division of Juvenile Justice has been plagued with high recidivism levels. According to a 2016 report by the corrections department, three quarters of juveniles released from a Division of Juvenile Justice facility in 2012 were rearrested within three years.

The majority of juvenile offenders are handled at the local level by county sheriffs and probation officers. That’s where the real strides in juvenile justice changes are being made, and where Newsom should look if he’s examining new models, Panks said.

Probation departments, she said, function independently when it comes to their work with juveniles, reporting to the executive and judicial branches. As a “consumer” of state juvenile justice services, however, a change from the top could be destabilizing, she said.

“By just moving from one bureaucratic area to another, you may miss out on some resources that are important that would help these youth reenter society,” Pank said. “We’re interlinked with [the state juvenile justice division] and what happens to them could have a ripple effect to the 90 percent of juveniles we oversee locally and the success we’ve experienced.”

Renee Menart, communications and policy analyst at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, agreed change needs to be enacted locally but was more optimistic about Newsom’s statements.

While the organization is not commenting on the budget until the governor’s vision for juvenile justice takes definitive shape, Menart said the center, like the governor, wants to see a new vision of juvenile justice in the state, not a reform of current policies. That includes getting youth out of the corrections department’s facilities, which she described as remote and dilapidated, and providing local resources designed for reentry into society.

“In order to provide successful delivery of rehabilitative services, juvenile justice needs to be community based and close to home,” Menart said. “We’ll have to learn more about what this looks like and its implementation, but the governor has been a strong support of juvenile justice in the past, and there’s certainly some promise.”

Still others believe reform needs to come on the front end of the juvenile system. Louis J. Shapiro, a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles, said youth offenders are often handled by judges who come from adult trial court, where the remedy is much different. While the adult system is focused on punishment, the youth system was designed to be focused on rehabilitation. “Money’s not the answer,” Shapiro said. “We need a change of attitude, not a change of funding.”

California is one of 11 states that uses the corrections department to oversee youth offenders. Juveniles are serviced by health or child welfare agencies in 20 states and by independent juvenile justice agencies in 18.

The Legislature has until June to amend, reject or sign off on the governor’s budget proposal.