Dismantling California's Division of Juvenile Justice

Here's what they're doing with juvenile corrections in California - Governor Brewer has been wanting to dismantle the AZ Department of Juvenile Corrections and privatize more services, too. I'm all for abolishing the entire criminal justice system and staring anew, but I don't think we have the same motives or ultimate vision in mind. 

I think the worry that youth will be tried as adults more often - absent state prisons for children - is legitimate, but can be addressed with legislation restricting juvenile transfers. We already know that youth tried as adults are more, not less likely, to re-offend, and we have an idea of what types of evidence-based practice can reduce juvenile delinquency.

In any event, this is worth following. In the meantime, don't be surprised to hear more soon about the AZ Department of Juvenile Corrections downsizing, consolidating resources, increasing privatization of services, and ultimately being dissolved. I think that's precisely what Director Flanagan was hired to do.

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Fight ahead over bold California move to close state-run youth prisons
Juvenile Justice Information Exchange
Susan Ferriss January 28, 2012

This story was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity
 
California, often a trendsetter, could make history if it approves Gov. Jerry Brown’s bid to close all state-run youth prisons and eliminate its state Division of Juvenile Justice.

Much depends, though, on whether the state’s politically influential prison guards, probation officers and district attorneys can be convinced — or forced by legislators — to agree to Brown’s proposal. That won’t be an easy sell, due to both public-safety arguments and sure-to-surface haggling over just who pays to house juvenile offenders.

Vowing to restructure government more efficiently, Brown, a Democrat, wants to close the last three of 11 youth prisons that have long been attacked by critics as “expensive failures.” If the state phases out the last three of its aging detention centers, all future young offenders would be held, schooled and treated by California’s 58 counties.

This is the second time since taking office last year that Brown has proposed closing the state juvenile division, which is part of its corrections system. The division’s responsibility has already been slashed dramatically from 10,000 wards in the mid-1990s to about 1,100 in state custody today. Their numbers may be few, but the cost for keeping those youth in state custody runs about $200,000-a-year for every ward.

A host of agendas

The drop in numbers of youths in state custody is due in part to a decline in juvenile crime in California, but also to state legislation in 2007 that blocked counties from sending nonviolent youth offenders to state-run detention centers.

It was a move driven, some argue, largely by California’s massive budget deficits and the desire to lower ballooning incarceration costs. But the decision also dovetailed with an emerging national philosophy favoring locally-based rehabilitation programs over state-run facilities that have been plagued with records of neglect, danger and sexual abuse.

Behind the policy debate: never-ending negotiations over money. The 2007 initiative included millions in state money to counties to devise and provide more effective treatment closer to wards’ home areas and families. Last year, after wrangling with Brown, legislators approved a deal requiring counties to begin paying $125,000 for each ward they sent to the state, if the state’s revenues didn’t improve.

Sure enough, revenues didn’t improve, and now the counties are balking at having to pay the $125,000 per ward they owe. And Brown isn’t collecting. Instead he has resurrected his idea to shut down the state facilities, and give counties even less than he offered before.

Many, but not all, juvenile justice reformers nationwide are cheering Brown’s announcement this month.
“The same phenomenon is happening on the two coasts,” said Bart Lubow, director of programs for high-risk youth at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He noted that New York State, too, is shifting care for juveniles more to local custody for cost-control and quality reasons.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal this year includes a deal for New York City to keep most of its offenders locally. Mayor Michael Bloomberg complained in 2010 that it cost New York City $62 million in 2009 to satisfy a requirement that it pay half the state’s costs for jailing, on daily average, fewer than 600 youth offenders from the city.

The state-run jails were far from New York City wards’ families, the mayor argued, and had dubious records, like California’s, with recidivism rates of about 80 percent.

Lubow of the Annie E. Casey Foundation said that if Brown is able to pull off the feat of closing all state facilities, other states will have a model to follow. “California is at the leading edge of a national trend,” he said, “to abandon centralized facilities that are scandal-prone and ineffective.”

What’s best for juvenile offenders?

As it was last year, Brown’s idea is embedded in his proposed 2012-13 state budget announced this month. It will be hashed over publicly and privately before legislators make a decision by a June 15 deadline.

Most legislators in California are Democrats, as Brown is, but they are always under pressure not to appear soft on crime. They are also mindful that California’s correctional workers’ union is a big player in state politics and a heavy donor to campaigns.

This time, given that only three state juvenile facilities remain, legislators are perhaps under more pressure not to overburden counties, which are already coping with fallout from last year’s budget deal.

That deal was considered historic because after years of waffling, legislators authorized a significant shift of certain low-level adult felons to county responsibility. The aim was to cut state costs and satisfy federal court orders to clear California’s overcrowded prisons.

Mark Varela, legislative chairman for the Chief Probation Officers of California, said his group continues to oppose closing the last three state juvenile detention centers, although, individually, there are some probation chiefs in California who favor it and say they are ready.

Varela said opponents’ “concern is that the youth in DJJ [the Division of Juvenile Justice] represent offenders with a high degree of sophistication,“ who could have a “negative impact” on lower-level offenders who might not easily be separated from them in local facilities.

By mixing the populations, Varela said, the more violent youths, some of them incarcerated for murder or sex offenses, could endanger or influence others and undermine their progress.

Hardball in Sacramento

District attorneys, too, are expected to fight Brown’s proposal; indeed, the California District Attorneys Association has already shown it can play hardball on the issue.

In hearings and official letters last year, the association argued that if California youth prisons were no longer on option, it was “inevitable” that for public safety, prosecutors would likely try many more juveniles as adults and send them to adult state prison. District attorneys also argued that if counties had to pay the state $125,000 per ward, more youths would also likely be prosecuted as adults.

Books Not Bars, a prison rights group that backs Brown’s proposal, is preparing to counter the prosecutors’ threat.

The group has crafted a draft bill designed to force counties to pay for minors they send to state prison, Jennifer Kim, a Books Not Bars leader, told the Center for Public Integrity. “We are currently shopping it around the Legislature,” Kim said.

Kim said the bill calls for counties to pay the state the going adult rate — about $52,500 a year — for each minor put in adult prison based on the discretion of a prosecutor.

That’s not as much as the $200,000 a year it costs the state for each ward in existing youth prisons, Kim said. But she said it could help dissuade counties from trying to avoid keeping young offenders by putting them in adult prison.

Kim said that while legislators might be vulnerable to soft-on-crime accusations, they also are under fire after years of chopping education severely, closing parks and stripping down other services. They need to justify, Kim said, spending millions on a system that fails to reform most of its wards, and has a record of documented abuses.

“California could be its own country,” Kim said. “It’s so big. And we can’t figure out how to handle about 1,000 kids? That’s smaller than the high school I went to.”

Like the district attorneys association, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association is also opposed to Brown’s idea.

“We’re very disappointed with the proposal. We feel it is an immense disservice to youth offenders,” JeVaughn Baker, spokesman for the correctional workers’ union, told the Center for Public Integrity.

Baker said that instead of a complete closure, the union favors trying to reduce costs per ward, and continuing improvements at the state-run juvenile prisons, which have been operating for a number of years under court decree to improve conditions.

However, Baker said, the union also is willing to talk about a compromise and “wants to be part of the solution.” A meeting is planned in mid-February among union representatives to discuss more steps toward continuing reforms to the state facilities, he said.

The correctional workers’ union contributed heavily to Brown’s election, and continues to have a seat at the table when it comes to prison reforms. But with California reeling from waves of budget cuts, it doesn’t have the clout it used to at the state Capitol and has had to accept changes that cut jobs, said Barry Krisberg, an expert on incarceration policy at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.

Krisberg, who is also an appointed monitor reporting on improvements at state-run youth facilities, predicted a tough sell for Brown’s proposal at the Capitol. “I’m hearing there is not much enthusiasm in the Legislature for this,” he said.

Krisberg also has his own doubts that the state government should completely phase out its ability to take custody of minors.

He fears that some counties aren’t bluffing when they argue that they are not suited to handle high-level young offenders.

Krisberg said a total closure “would be the most radical juvenile justice reform in history.” He’d rather see the division shifted to the state’s Department of Education, possibly, and out of the prison system.

He also noted that county systems for youth offenders are not scandal-free. The Los Angeles County Probation Department is under federal order to rein in use of force, including pepper spray, as well as neglect of wards with mental health problems and suicidal tendencies.

In December, a federal report found that the Los Angeles probation department still fell short of improvements it was ordered to make.

Krisberg said that in the end, he’d prefer to see California keep a few hundred beds for juveniles at the state level and enact strong policies and provide adequate funding for monitoring and improving local treatment.
Because many high-level wards are adults by the time they’ve served their sentences, what they critically need, Krisberg said, is help from the state with post-incarceration re-entry to society, including housing, access to mental-health medication and job placement.

Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan group in San Francisco, is a friend of Krisberg, but differs with him on this issue, arguing for a shutdown of state facilities that he says are relics of a failed rehabilitation model.

Besides, Macallair said, the majority of the state’s wards come from only about a dozen counties, out of 58, that have grown reliant on the state, and need to be pushed to develop a better infrastructure locally for rehabilitation. His group’s research, Macallair said, shows that despite claims to the contrary, California’s counties have enough room and the ability to appropriately separate juveniles.

Meanwhile, he said, “you’ve got a state system that’s really hanging by a thumbnail.”

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit organization focused on investigative journalism.

Re-entry for youth with disabilities.

After Jail, Youth With Disabilities Need Special Support to Stay Out

By Nirvi Shah 

December 30, 2011 

Education Week

 

When young people with disabilities end up in the juvenile justice system, they're less likely to return to youth prisons after their sentence is up if they have jobs or go to school quickly after being released, a new paper says.

However, comprehensive programs that help these youth go from prison to the outside world are scarce, says this piece from Project Forum at the National Association of State Directors of Special Education. And juveniles with disabilities have a high recidivism rate—more than the 55 percent rate for youth without disabilities.

The report looks closely at the practices in four states—Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, and Oregon—when it comes to supporting all juveniles, including those with disabilities, who are leaving the justice system.

Some common practices the report found in states with programs intended to reduce recidivism for these young people include: a continuum of supports for youth that begins in prison and keeps going once they leave; transition facilitators or coordinators who are dedicated to working with these youth; and programs for reentering society that are comprehensive, addressing education, employment, social and behavioral skills, mental health, substance-abuse issues, housing, and transportation. Another common theme in the report? Budget problems often keep these programs from going long-term.

Here are some details of individual state's programs:

•Before youths' release, Arizona's Department of Juvenile Corrections assigns them a transition coordinator who establishes a relationship and supports them after they leave. Four of these coordinators travel the state and work with parole officers, the state director of special education, and school districts to ensure these juveniles are enrolled in the right programs at the end of their sentences. These coordinators even go to students' IEP meetings.

•Georgia's "Think Exit at Entry" program provides educational planning, progress reviews, transition facilitators, and other supports to youth in the juvenile justice system, including those with disabilities. The program has been scaled back since a federal grant expired in 2007, although some parts of it have kept going because of the partnerships already established among state agencies.

•Hawaii's Olomana School serves students in the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, and youth participate in regular meetings about their behavior and school work. Because the state runs all schools in Hawaii, transferring records back to schools when students are released is seamless—and transfer of records is critical to a successful reentry for students with disabilities, the report says.

•Oregon's Project STAY OUT—Strategies Teaching Adolescent Young Offenders to Use Transition Skills—is specifically for youth with an IEP, 504 plan, or mental health diagnosis. Youth work on self-determination skills, social skills, finding work, and other goals. One study found that 66 percent of STAY OUT participants were either employed or in school during the first six months after their release from juvenile justice programs, the very things that are likely to keep them from returning.

For the full report on re-entry programs for youth with disabilities in the juvenile justice system, go here.

Flanagan: The closing of Catalina.

An editorial to the AZ Daily Star from the Director of the Department of Juvenile Corrections...

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Catalina facility's closure, move ultimately will serve troubled youths better

Arizona Daily Star 8/23/2011

http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/article_55d36874-9747-52a1-8e25-4fd9143a5c21.html

by Charles Flanagan

"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."

- Alfred North Whitehead

While the vast majority of Arizona's youths never have problems with criminal conduct, some do. There are many factors that can often derail these young people on the path to adulthood, leading them toward self-destructive behavior. The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections believes that rehabilitation, treatment, education and positive enforcement are the most effective avenues for getting our young people back on the right track to live happy, safe and productive lives. I firmly believe in the agency's vision: "Safer Communities Through Successful Youth."

As the new director for the department, one of my goals is to provide troubled youths with the best resources possible in order to turn their lives around. As part of this charge, I am making some changes to more effectively serve the entire state and provide the widest possible range of services to each of the youths in our custody so that we can successfully reintegrate them into our shared communities. Most prominent among these changes is the planned closure of Catalina Mountain School in Pima County.

By the end of September, the 70-74 youths currently at Catalina Mountain will be transferred to the Department's Adobe Mountain/Black Canyon complex in Maricopa County. This relocation will accomplish several goals. It allows the department to close its most outdated unit (Catalina Mountain was built in 1967); takes advantage of efficiencies by consolidating youths and services at a single complex; and makes available the state's full range of programs and treatment options to every child in the state's custody and care.

The goal of this plan is to provide a concentration of all resources and services on a single campus, making available specialized treatment for substance abuse, mental health concerns and sex offenders. Currently, specialized treatment for mental health issues and sex offenders is not available at Catalina Mountain School, which also houses only male youths. Consolidation also will allow the department to add a Skills-4-Work program to the Adobe Mountain School, enabling youths to learn trades associated with culinary arts, cosmetology, building trades, sewing, fire science, working with wildlife and other technical careers.

The consolidation of youths, staff and programs to a single complex will result in estimated cost savings to the state of nearly $1.5 million in fiscal 2012 and $3.8 million in fiscal 2013. In fact, we anticipate a savings of approximately $100 per youth, per day, by combining operations rather than maintaining the Catalina Mountain School.

I understand this closure and relocation will result in disruption for some department staffers and families of youths in custody. The department's goal is to employ or facilitate the employment of the majority of Catalina Mountain School employees. The concentration of staff at one facility will enhance coverage for youths in crisis and provide a larger, more professionally diverse staff with expertise in a range of areas.

Additionally, the department will make available video visitation in Tucson for families of youths from Southeastern Arizona who are relocated to the Adobe Mountain/Black Canyon complex. The department also will maintain the area's parole services, private-sector service providers and community service activities, and is exploring the establishment of halfway houses.

The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections takes seriously its mission to positively impact the thought process and behavior pattern of youths in its custody. I believe the consolidation of services and programs to our Adobe Mountain/Black Canyon complex will help us perform that mission more effectively and efficiently.

By joining together in this effort, we have the tremendous opportunity to provide a positive outcome for troubled youths.

Charles Flanagan is director of the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.

AzDJC's Flanagan closes Catalina Mountain School

Sorry to be so slow with this, folks...I'm still on hiatus.

Tucson's Catalina Mountain School for troubled youths to close

AZ Daily Star

July 12, 2011

The state will close the Catalina Mountain School on North Oracle Road by Oct. 1, the director of the Department of Juvenile Corrections said Thursday.

Director Charles Flanagan said it isn't sound fiscal or correctional practice to operate the Tucson school plus two others just north of Phoenix.

Catalina Mountain School will stop admitting kids "in about a week," Flanagan said.

He told employees about the closure at a meeting early Thursday afternoon.

The shutdown will save the state nearly $1.5 million this fiscal year and $3.8 million in 2013, he said.

The 74 males at the 124-bed Tucson school will be moved to Black Canyon and Adobe Mountain, which are operated as one facility.

The Tucson school is the one closing for several reasons, he said, including:

• All girls and juveniles who are sex offenders or need mental-health treatment are already sent to the Phoenix facilities.

• Tucson doesn't have as many career-training programs, and fewer options for moving and managing boys who have behavioral problems during their incarceration.

• Youths now at Catalina Mountain will have better access to programs for substance dependence. Flanagan said 90 percent of the kids have substance use histories and roughly 60 percent are substance-dependent.

a "huge loss"

Pima County Juvenile Court officials were surprised by the announcement.

While the court does not send a lot of children to the facility, officials said the move could be a detriment to youths who won't have direct access to family and friends.

Judge Karen Adam, who presides over Pima County Juvenile Court, described the facility's closure as a "huge loss."

It's important to place youths in their community because they can receive visits from friends and family, and it's easier for them to reintegrate to society, Adam said.

Juvenile Court Director Rik Schmidt echoed Adam's concerns.

Flanagan, the state's Juvenile Corrections director, agreed that a downside to the closure is that some kids will be farther away from family.

However, he said, only 15 percent of the youths receive family visits at least once every two weeks. Only 30 percent of the boys at Catalina Mountain are ever visited by relatives, he added.

Juvenile Corrections will set up a video visitation system to ease the burden of families driving to Maricopa County.

The department will move its parole office to central Tucson.

About a quarter of the boys at Catalina Mountain are from Pima County, with 15 percent from Cochise. Many of the rest will actually be closer to their homes once they move. They were sent to Tucson to keep the head count up.

The average stay in the state juvenile system is about seven months, but it is about three months at Catalina Mountain.

Most are in the system for property crimes.

There are between 30 and 40 Pima County juveniles in the state's three facilities, said Pima County's Schmidt. The number committed there has decreased over the years. In 2010, Pima's Juvenile Court sent 61 juveniles to state facilities. About five years ago, it sent more than 100, he said.

employee, volunteer losses

Besides the relocation of the detained youths, the loss of employees and 119 volunteers are the other downsides to Catalina Mountain's closure, Flanagan said.

"These people are committed to this profession," he said. "These are good, good people."

He said he hopes to find places for the volunteers in community corrections and parole services.

Some of the 124 Tucson employees will be offered the 68 jobs to be added at the Phoenix schools, he said. Transfer offers will be based on state employment rules, and he estimated about 30 will end up working in Phoenix.

Six employees will remain to provide security at the Tucson campus through the end of the department's lease next June 30.

The state owns the buildings on land leased from the state Land Department. That department will decide whether to sell the property or lease it to someone else.

The Phoenix schools have about 330 youths and about 270 vacant beds.

In the last fiscal year, it cost $132,218 to house a child at Catalina Mountain, compared with $95,765 at the Phoenix schools.

"That's still too high in our estimation," Flanagan said of Phoenix, although he said there is no national standard for juvenile costs because state laws differ. Arizona juvenile corrections houses kids up to age 18, while in some states it's longer.

DID YOU KNOW?

Catalina Mountain School, at 14500 N. Oracle Road, was built in the late 1960s, and is the oldest of the state's three juvenile centers, said Department of Juvenile Corrections Director Charles Flanagan.

New AZ Juvenile Corrections Director: Charles Flanagan

For those receiving this via email: this is not new or revised - I had just taken it down to work on, but don't have time, so it's back up. Will post a new, separate piece on Flanagan's appointment once I can chat with him and take the time to write it up.

Peg

I seldom ever re-write blog posts, but sometimes new information or insight calls for a re-evaluation of my positions or strategies. In this case, time and reflection has compelled me to re-evaluate both. This is therefore a rewrite - the older version is gone.

Last week, Governor Jan Brewer announced the retirement of the current director of the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, Michael Branham. This alone concerned me, as I knew he'd been resisting her desire to privatize the whole department. What concerned me more, however, is the naming of his replacement: current Deputy Director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Charles Flanagan - the one man for whom I've had more animosity towards than his boss, Chuck Ryan.

My feelings about Deputy Director Flanagan are rooted in experiences I've had or been privy to behind the scenes that aren't necessary to detail here. What matters is that under his watch the homicide and suicide rates in the state prisons have skyrocketed. The ACLU is investigating the ADC's abuse and neglect of seriously mentally ill prisoners - all too often managed with solitary confinement, which has been shown to be especially harmful to the mental health of prisoners with pre-existing psychiatric disorders.


As an example of both the effects of solitary and the cruel mentality of the state: one young man I know of, Mark, set himself on fire in desperation after begging for a year to have a cellie or be re-classified to a different yard (out of SMU-I, which is where he was when he set himself on fire), the experience of exile and isolation was so tortuous for him. Characteristic of this administration, despite being burned over 80% of his body - arguably punishment enough for an apparent suicide attempt - the state prosecuted him for arson and gave him more time. Is it any wonder that the level of despair and violence has risen so high in there, when the most vulnerable and impaired prisoners are so brutally treated by the ADC as a matter of course?






Such responses to mentally ill prisoners already traumatized by the conditions of their confinement not only shows an institutional culture void of compassion, but also a lack of competency and creativity. Charles Flanagan may have only been in his current position for the past 2 1/2 years, but one of the cases made for his appointment as the new ADJC director is that he's been helping build the ADC into what it is all this time - he's a career soldier there. If he wants credit for that - as if it's something worth claiming - then he needs to take responsibility for where things have gone awry, too - the pattern of abuse and neglect emerging at the state prisons under this administration has been festering for decades under bureaucrats like Chuck Ryan and his mentor, Terry Stewart.


The degree to which Charles Flanagan is part of the same good old boys network at the ADC or part of the resistance to it has yet to be seen. Former ASPC-Eyman Deputy Warden Carl Toersbijns - who I respect immensely, for an officer of the law in this state - keeps trying to convince me that Flanagan is one of the "good guys". My own verdict came in on him long ago - but with new testimony and a look at the old evidence, I'm willing to give his case another look. I want the judiciary in this state to do the same more often for our prisoners with wrongful conviction claims, so I'll try to lead by example.

Still, a good many people have died while Deputy Director Flanagan has helped whitewash the festering conditions inside his prisons over the past couple of years. That's not for me to forgive - that's for those victims and survivors of prison violence and neglect to wrestle with. My job, as I see it, is to amplify their voices, their protest, their resistance to what's happened and continues to happen to Arizona's state prisoners under the current regime, not to give those already in power even more by giving them "equal" space or consideration in my blogs. They already have the benefit of the doubt from everyone else - I'm often the only one to present the other side.

So, while I'm open to Carl's version of the deputy director's role in things under Chuck Ryan, I'm not cutting Flanagan a break. He's responsible by his own claim to leadership there for where the ADC is now at this point in history. I just recognize that I'm not in a position myself to judge accurately what he's done behind the scenes on behalf of prisoners to counter the damage his boss' leadership through the years has done - that is, I'm not absolutely sure if he's part of the problem or part of the solution.

In either case, Charles Flanagan's going to be part of this whole system injustice for some time to come, since the ADJC feeds so many of its kids to the ADC when they're done "correcting" them. In light of that, I invited him to have a dialogue with me; that, after a year or so of having ADC General Counsel Karyn Klausner run interference between us because I simmered with rage at the thought of him (I can only imagine how he feels about me). He promptly and graciously accepted. We'll talk after he settles into his new job - assuming I'm not sidelined over my graffiti by then.

In the meantime, those of you who have questions for him about his term in the adult system or his vision for criminalized youth, please shoot them to me between now and July 1. I can't promise that they'll be answered, but I'll make sure that they're publicly asked. Let your friends and loved ones inside know the invitation extends to them as well, and have them write to me at:

Arizona Prison Watch
PO Box 20494
Phoenix, AZ 85036

I'd love to get some prisoner feedback to share with the community out here about this new appointment; put the word out that it would mean a lot to me what the guys who have seen Flanagan rise through the ranks have to say about his integrity and competency as a CO and administrator.

Anyone interested in following juvenile justice issues in Arizona and helping to maintain a new blog, Arizona Juvenile Prison Watch, please contact me as well.

Thanks.

Truth-in-Sentencing, Arizona: one in ten youth will be sexually abused the first year in juvenile prison.

This is profoundly tragic. This kid was in state prison for shoplifting and drug use - that's a real problem, given who the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections touts as their main customers: "the worst of the worst young criminals in the state." I have yet to see any of the real bad guys get abused in prison, but we shrug off reports like this one as if they're freak accidents and only the criminals we love to hate get hurt badly. Thank god the judge let the kid go home after all this.

Judges should be ordered to read aloud at sentencing the risks they expose each child to if they plan to lock them up - beginning with the one in every ten kids who will be sexually abused the first year they're in the system. Then when a child is raped or suicides in custody, the judge should be held civilly liable for the risk they knowingly, explicitly subjected them to as part of their punishment.

The judiciary can't possibly think that juvenile detention centers are really therapeutic rehabilitation facilites to send children to - which is why the AzDJC calls places like Adobe Mountain "Safe Schools", instead of what they are: child prisons. It makes the prospect of committing a child there more palatable to the well-intended. They're really prison prep schools, though, and come complete with gangs, drugs, and sexual abuse - as well as child-size prison uniforms, stark cells, handcuffs and shackles.

We just pack a bunch of naive, emotionally impaired kids in with a few real disturbed thugs to justify keeping those places open at all, then indoctrinate them into a culture that leaves them few options for roles and self-image to choose from outside of the criminal justice paradigm populated by distinctly-defined "criminals", "victims", and cops.

Most children who have been criminalized and institutionalized are also survivors of abuse already, and grow up with unresolved trauma issues that lead to self-medicating with drugs - and then prison again. It is not uncommon for their involvement with the juvenile justice system to be the greater source of trauma than their adolescent participation in crime was, though.

This kid, for one, was hardly safe - and the truth is that when this kind of thing happens it hardly ever hits the press, so the public is lulled into thinking that violence in the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections is not the rule. Prisons RUN on violence and the threat of it to coerce compliance, though, people. They are authoritarian police institutions - do not send children there and expect them to come out healthy. If they do, they are the exception to the rule, not the other way around.

Sentencing practices should be closely monitored for all critical outcomes - not only recidivism, but suicide, homicide, further victimization, sexual exploitation: once we start treating kids like criminals, we seem to stop caring about all other aspects of their lives but whether or not they remain criminals...nurturing little but prison culture, stigmatization, and a negative self-image in the process.

Don't believe them for a minute when they tell you they have to be like that because of the serious pathology of their youth - the worst are still out getting away with it. The kids the AzDJC really have the most of are the ones who got caught and were too poor to swing their own attorneys - a good many of whom were low-level, non-violent drug offenders who just kept relapsing on probation, and everyone knows that a bunch of the kids we throw into juvie should have gone through mental health treatment, not the criminal justice system - and would have but for the lack of funds for public mental health services in this state. Those kids couldn't get into a residential treatment program unless they were first criminalized (that must be a violation of the Olmstead Act) - and then they ended up in prison instead.

So, this article is for those who still believe that "criminals deserve what they get in prison." Folks who really believe that do these kids the greatest harm through their deliberate indifference to their suffering - as do the bureaucrats who do damage control by distorting the gravity of their plight behind the best of bars. When the AzDJC faced the threat of privatization last year, they and the officers' unions chose to appeal not to our collective sense of responsibility to help these kids, but to our fear of them instead, arguing that private companies can't safely handle the highly dangerous young criminals they have in their care. Public safety would be compromised, they argued - never mind how it would affect the welfare of our criminalized youth. I even heard one guy refer to the escape at Kingman (as if the lack of state oversight had no bearing on the outcome) - suggesting that young state prisoners would be busting out and killing everyone if they could.

But the murderers and sociopaths they have in custody aren't the ones getting screwed - it's the kids like this one below and Presley Austin who represent the incoming tide...AzDJC Director Mike Branham should be the one out in front on this telling the public how bad these places are for such youth, that there's no way to make the prison system "work" for most of them, and that we should be directing our resources into other kinds of services for them before they hit the child prisons.

The problem with committing our children so readily to the care of the state, is that it tends to place its own survival over the best interests of the people its machinery was constructed to serve in the first place. Mike could have embraced an abolitionist vision and steered the entire agency towards dissolution, redirecting resources back to their prisoners' home communities to decide how best to teach their youth the nuances of justice, and to cultivate a better sense of social responsibility than our current reliance on these archaic institutions has done thus far.

Thank you, Judge Aragón, for exercising compassion and taking responsibility for correcting your orders. Someone should fire that prosecutor - especially if he's the one who coaxed the judge to send that kid up river in the first place. He was some kind of dangerous, alright...

Why can't these places keep their prisoners safe?

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Release is ordered for boy, 16, after attacks in custody
Kim Smith / Arizona Daily Star
March 5, 2011


A Pima County Juvenile Court judge who sent a 16-year-old boy to the Catalina Mountain School last December ordered his release Friday after learning the boy may have been repeatedly stabbed with a pen one week last month and sodomized the next.

Judge Gus Aragón ordered the boy placed on probation until his 18th birthday in March 2012, said Assistant Pima County Public Defender Terri Pones.

"I am ecstatic," Pones said following the hearing.

According to court documents filed by Pones, Aragón sent the boy to the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections in December after the drug-addicted boy repeatedly violated probation.

The boy had been adjudicated delinquent for stealing candy and soft drinks from a Marana park concession stand, Pones said. He also has drug convictions.

On Feb. 3, a teacher overheard the teenager's roommate tell another roommate the teenager had been stabbed in the throat, arm and rib cage with a pen two days prior, according to the documents. The teenager told his mother and corrections officials he was afraid of retaliation and he'd overheard other teens talking about assaulting him again.

The boy and his mother were assured he would be housed by himself, staff would supervise him on a more individual basis and someone would always be "shadowing him," Pones said in the court documents.

On Feb. 15, the teenager was taken to Northwest Medical Center after being sodomized by a roommate and forced to perform a sexual act, Pones said.

After being discharged from the hospital, the teenager was sent to Adobe Mountain in Phoenix for his safety, making it difficult for his family to visit him, Pones said.

Because of the assault, Pones said the boy's "treatment needs have now far exceeded" those he had in December and he ought to be released so he can receive treatment in the community.

David Berkman, Pima County's chief criminal deputy attorney, said prosecutors asked Aragón to schedule a hearing on the allegations once the corrections department completed its investigation, but he declined to do so.

"It appears he accepted what they said," Berkman said.

Prosecutors objected to the boy's release, Berkman said, and may ask for another hearing on the matter, depending upon the results of the investigation.

Laura E. Dillingham, director of communications for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, said the investigation is ongoing.

Contact reporter Kim Smith at 573-4241 or kimsmith@azstarnet.com

Tagging gets teen a year in juvie prison: for less than $5,000 in damages..

What a tragic way to order a community's priorities. Does no one have any creative, original thoughts on how to work with artistic youth acting out through vandalism? Like having him paint some murals, or put together an art show, or channel that energy more constructively somehow? He could be working off that restitution at a part time job, too.

Do these judges even know what kind of hell they send those kids to when they commit them to the Department of Juvenile Corrections? The gangs, the violence, the bullying, the despair? A year is a huge chunk to take out of a young person's life. They aren't rehabilitating him - they just sent him there to be punished.

A year in youth prison (which just prepares kids for many years in adult prisons) is going to cost the state more than five times as much to cover as the damage this kid did, and in the process subjects him to constant coercion. For what? To make an example of him. I guess that means that any other kids who go tagging around town can expect to go to prison, too.

The biggest example I see being displayed here is of a rigid and abusive judge and city attorney. That's an example of what not to be like when you grow up, kids. I'd take the tagger as my friend over the people who put him away any day.

Tagging is not a violent crime, by the way. It is a nuisance. Incarceration is violent, however. Prisons keep their prisoners only because they have the authority to chain you up, lock you down, and even kill you if you try to run away. Sometimes people die in there well before their time. They aren't too good at keeping people from killing themselves or each other.

This isn't justice - it smacks more of vindictiveness and abuse. Guess it's amazing they didn't prosecute him as an adult so they could really draw blood.

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Yuma tagger sent to prison for a year

September 29, 2010 5:44 PM

BY JAMES GILBERT - SUN STAFF WRITER

The 17-year-old juvenile tagger known by the moniker of “SKREW,” who caused thousands of dollars in damage in graffiti in Yuma, has been sentenced to a year at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.

Manuel Villa, who is estimated to have caused between $4,000 and $5,000 in graffiti damage to residential and business structures, was sentenced recently to serve until his 18th birthday in juvenile corrections. He was also ordered to pay more than $2,000 in restitution.

The Yuma Police Department began seeking “SKREW” in early April as part of Yuma Mayor Al Krieger's new campaign to curtail unwanted graffiti and vandalism, dubbed TAGS (The Anti Graffiti Strategy). It includes stepped-up enforcement, more education, an awareness campaign and enhanced partnerships between city departments and other government agencies, schools, retailers and community groups such as 78-CRIME and Neighborhood Watch organizations.

According to YPD, “SKREW” had been actively tagging his moniker since the summer of 2009 to city of Yuma property, several residential properties, a bridge and at least two churches.

After the city of Yuma announced TAGS, YPD turned to the public to help identify him.

After receiving tips that “SKREW” may live in the Carver Park area, which was supported by the numerous incidents of graffiti throughout the area over the past year, YPD canvassed the neighborhood and contacted Villa in May.

After being confronted with overwhelming evidence, Villa confessed and was arrested.

“We now have an example of consequences for vandalism and graffiti damage,” said Dave Nash, spokesman for the city of Yuma.

Nash said so far this fiscal year, city crews have cleaned up 633 incidents of graffiti. For the week of Sept. 15-21, there were 71 reported incidents of graffiti, compared with 93 last week, an increase that is common for this time of year.

“We tend to see seasonal spikes this time of year when people come to Yuma,” Nash said.

Nash added that graffiti incidents range between 70 and 80 week to as low as 30 a week.

The city of Yuma encourages the community to keep up their effort in cracking down on graffiti by calling the Graffiti Busters hot line at 329-2828.

James Gilbert can be reached at jgilbert@yumasun.com or 539-6854.

About Arizona Juvenile Prison Watch

This blog is intended to shine some light on Arizona's juvenile justice system, and to serve as a resource to individuals and groups concerned about the effect of the prison industrial complex on our children. It is edited by Margaret J. Plews (known to all but my father and law enforcement as "Peggy"). I also author and administer the Prison Abolitionist, Hard Time: Hep C, and Arizona Prison Watch blogs, and write at several other sites.

When I post my own commentary with articles written by others, I usually indicate so with voice, boundaries, and italics. I screen all comments as I try not to post vindictive, slanderous, or otherwise cruel statements: words alone, I believe, can be violent, and I won't have violence here.

Dissent, however, is fine - it compels me to re-think and articulate my own positions better. I have a prison abolitionist's bias; some find it radical and provocative. Others don't care what it's called: they tend to recognize my bias as their own because they've had enough of this, too. In short, I believe we can and must build our civilization around non-violence, which we can't without abolishing the prison industrial complex. "Criminal justice" as we know it is all too often violent and retaliatory, serving not to make us more safe, but to reinforce the misogynistic, homophobic, classist white supremacy that capitalism both nourishes and thrives on.

Often those we end up criminalizing, including children are victims from the lower and middle classes engaged in some form of survival or resistance - not sociopathic predators. Many are psychiatrically disabled or chemically dependent, not criminally-inclined. They are survivors already of physical abuse, rape, war, hate crimes, poverty, and other forms of violence, some at the level of genocidal attacks on their people. Prison in particular compounds such trauma; it certainly doesn't "correct" the effects.

While I realize there are many people who can't safely be returned to society from prison today, I believe that we need to plan for their return to society tomorrow, and prepare our children now to negotiate the world differently than we learned how to - beginning with the value of non-violence. That means not even giving the state exclusive permission to use violence...which means the state will have to justify and defend its existence to the people without soldiers and cops. If it can't, then maybe it shouldn't exist...

That's just a small sample of my radical bias. I also spent many years doing outreach to people who were homeless and mentally ill, building a supported housing program and transitioning people out of homelessness, negotiating at all levels of the criminal justice system for the freedom - and the "treatment" - of those I advocated for. I always had the best intentions, but I don't know that they were always in my clients' best interests. I didn't understand a lot of things that I understand now.

For those of you willing to engage with me on these ideas and stretch a little here: Please be creative and reach for what you believe the next generation needs and deserves - not just what is "realistic" for us to build or for them to settle for. The prison abolitionist's dream of social and economic justice is not one to belittle or diminish: the time has come to realize it, actually, as anything less is unsustainable. In any event, though, whether you agree or disagree with my occasional remarks or choice of articles, feel free to leave a comment - it'll probably go up once I see it.

Also, there's a lot of ground to cover here, and I'm no expert in juvenile justice, so beyond what feedback you have on specific blog posts, please think about how I can make this a better site for folks. Email me your suggestions, corrections, information, or links that you think might be helpful to kids and their families being chewed up by the system, policymakers trying to decide where to invest too few resources, YCO's and street cops thinking there's got to be a better way to do this than training these kids to be better prisoners (and criminals), and community members desperately trying to keep vulnerable children from falling through the cracks and landing in the laps of their local or state systems of justice.

Finally, if you're presently wrestling with the system and have some questions, all I have to offer is my opinion, really: I don't have legal training, money, power, or most of the answers. I'm not even really from around here (I moved here from Ann Arbor in 2004). I've been known to really piss people off, too, so I may not be the best friend to have fighting for you. But I'll do my best to help or refer you elsewhere if you have a pressing concern for someone in the system and need a hand.

My contact info is:

Peggy Plews
AZ Juvenile Prison Watch
PO Box 20494
Phoenix, AZ 85036

480-580-6807

prisonabolitionist@gmail.com