Last year, Los Angeles County supervisors called on a panel of judges, prosecutors, public defenders and youth advocates to reimagine a juvenile justice system and report back.
Now, the results are in, and the 150-member group is calling for an entirely new approach: Instead of surveillance and incarceration, teams of counselors, mediators and community members would help respond to crises and guide youth who commit crimes toward restorative justice and job opportunities.
Under the plan expected to be heard by the Board of Supervisors in the next month, the county’s two remaining juvenile halls and its six detention camps would be shut down, with most young people instead housed in “Safe and Secure Healing Centers.” Only those found to have committed the most serious and violent offenses would be held in locked facilities, but they would be reconstructed with a less prison-like and more therapeutic design.
As a result, the juvenile probation department would end its troubled tenure overseeing thousands of young people, replaced by a system driven by a “care first, jail last” philosophy local leaders have said they are committed to enacting.
At an initial cost of $75 million, a new youth development department would be charged with diverting many more youth out of the justice system altogether and would oversee community-led “Youth Engagement and Support” teams to provide crisis response and community supervision.
Should the plan proceed, the jobs of more than 3,400 probation employees who now oversee roughly 530 young people ages 12 to 17 in the county’s juvenile detention facilities and another 4,600 who live at home under department supervision CONTINUE READING: Weighing a Transformative Model for Youth Justice - LA Progressive
