The Los Angeles County Probation Department does not have a contingency plan ready for the possibility the state will force the county to close its two largest juvenile detention facilities on April 16, a situation branded as “irresponsible” by one oversight commissioner.
Probation Chief Deputy Kimberly Epps announced the department’s stance Thursday, March 14, to the county’s Probation Oversight Commission, telling the commissioners the department has not “begun plans to relocate and we will not begin plans for a coordinated relocation” of the two juvenile facilities, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey and the Barry J. Nidorf Secure Youth Treatment Facility in Sylmar.
“We plan to come into compliance in the facilities where we are,” Epps said. “We believe no one can care for our youth better than we can.”
Epps’ message mirrored what her boss, Chief Probation Officer Guillermo Viera Rosa, told the executive board of AFSCME Local 685, the union representing the department’s rank-and-file officers, during a Feb. 29 meeting, according to a memo to its members.
“We were informed that Chief Rosa does not plan to close any facilities and there is no plan for layoffs,” the executive board wrote. “The Chief explained to the Executive Board that the current placement and location of the juveniles in the institutions is the safest place for them to continue to receive care, services, protection and rehabilitation.”
The Board of State and Community Corrections, the regulatory agency overseeing California’s juvenile detention system, disagreed with that assessment in February when it declared both facilities “unsuitable” for the confinement of minors for failing to meet the state’s minimum standards. State law stipulates that any “unsuitable” facility must be emptied after 60 days and cannot be used until a reinspection confirms conditions have improved.
The Los Angeles County Probation Department declined to address what will happen if it fails the final inspection, issuing a statement saying it continues to “provide appropriate care to the youth in our facilities.”
“We are maintaining all our necessary operations and will continue to move toward compliance with state regulations,” the statement read. “We are required to continue housing and providing care for the young people placed with us by the courts, and we will do that.”
In a statement, county Supervisor Janice Hahn, whose district includes Los Padrinos, agreed relocation is not ideal.
“Moving youth is incredibly disruptive and has not worked in the past, so I hope that the Probation Department is right about their ability to come into compliance in time,” she said.
Collision course
The county’s refusal to plan for possible closures has seemingly placed it on a collision course with the state. If L.A. County does not comply with the BSCC order, the state would need to seek judicial intervention.
State law does not describe a specific enforcement mechanism. Only two facilities — both in Los Angeles County last year — have ever been shut down by the BSCC.
A BSCC spokesperson declined to comment on how it would enforce the order. The BSCC meets on April 11 to “make the final decision for both facilities” and plans to conduct new inspections before the meeting.
While the Probation Department’s leadership has expressed confidence it can resolve the remaining deficiencies before the deadline, critics say the county’s refusal to plan for the worst-case scenario is dangerous.
“The lack of a plan is irresponsible,” said Sean Garcia-Leys, an oversight commissioner and co-executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center.
There is not enough space in Los Angeles County’s other juvenile facilities to take the nearly 300 youth housed at Los Padrinos and the SYTF. Alternative arrangements to send youth to other counties, or to reduce the juvenile population, should have begun by now, Garcia-Leys said.
“We’re headed toward a situation where there is no facility in Los Angeles County that is lawful to confine pre-adjudication youth,” he said.
County presentation ‘baffling’
Commission Chair Eduardo Mundo, a former deputy probation officer with 30 years of experience in field, described the county’s presentation at Thursday’s meeting as “baffling” because it did not address longstanding staffing issues, the primary driving force behind nearly all of the areas of noncompliance.
“They were so unprepared that it is appalling,” he said. “There is something that is giving them the idea that they’re not going to be forced to empty the halls.”
Epps told the commission L.A. County is meeting weekly with the BSCC for technical assistance and has developed an internal “corrective action plan” to address nine areas of noncompliance remaining at Los Padrinos and five remaining at the SYTF. The department’s leadership now holds thrice-weekly meetings to review and confirm progress, she said.
The county is aggressively recruiting new officers, though it continues, much like other law enforcement agencies, to struggle to find enough qualified candidates willing to stick it out.
The new internal CAP states the department is in the process of onboarding recently reassigned officers from field services as a stopgap measure. It has developed new policies around staff training, juvenile discipline, room confinements and safety checks, all of which were flagged as noncompliant earlier this year.
Mundo compared the fixes to applying a “used Band-Aid to a bleeding cut.” The redeployment of officers from other divisions may allow the department to pass an inspection now, but forcing inexperienced officers to work in the halls against their wishes is not sustainable, he said.
“You don’t want somebody who doesn’t want to be there working with the kids,” he said.
Staffing crisis years in making
L.A. County has struggled to address the staffing crisis for years and has repeatedly found itself in the BSCC’s cross hairs as a result.
Central Juvenile and Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall were first declared “unsuitable” in 2021, but they managed to avoid closure by passing an inspection before the clock ran out. The BSCC went back and forth with L.A. County for two more years, before finally ordering the closure of Central and Nidorf, minus the SYTF unit, in July.
Instead of fixing Central and Nidorf, the county opted to consolidate and transferred the juveniles to a reopened Los Padrinos before the 60-day deadline expired.
Though the Probation Department managed to pull off the move, it has been in a near perpetual state of emergency since.
Staff members continued to call out at alarming rates. Los Padrinos, once seen as a fresh start, experienced two violent escape attempts within the four months, highlighting the newly opened facility’s physical flaws and depleted workforce. Youth complained of broken air conditioners, late arrivals to school and a lack of recreational activities. They told inspectors they were forced to urinate in the corners of their rooms because there weren’t enough staff to take them to the restroom overnight.
Meanwhile, the county has spent nearly a year trying to stop a proliferation of drugs within the facilities since a youth died from a fatal overdose in May.
The BSCC inspected Los Padrinos and the SYTF in August and found both out of compliance with state law. The county had until January to fix the identified problems, and, though county officials announced they had completed the work, both facilities ultimately failed reinspections, triggering another unsuitability determination in February.
Pleas for workers to show up
Staff morale has plummeted to such a low point that union leaders are pleading with members to show up for training sessions and to cooperate with an unpopular mandate reassigning 250 field officers to the halls on 60-day rotations.
“As your President, I am asking you to please work with the department with deployment and reassignment so that we may pass the BSCC inspection,” wrote Stacy Ford, the president of Local 685. “If we don’t pass the BSCC inspection, nothing else will matter because our department may not exist as it is now.”
Garcia-Leys, the oversight commissioner, said he worries the county is simply trying to reset the clock.
“Best case, the department is planning to get through this inspection and then going right back to being noncompliant and starting this whole process again,” he said. “It’s impossible to accept any of these things at face value when they’ve done this so many times before and always turned out to have exaggerated their successes.”
Failures acknowledged
In a February letter to the BSCC, Viera Rosa, who took over the department while it was already in crisis, acknowledged L.A. County’s repeated failure to uphold the state’s minimum standards.
He urged regulators, ahead of the suitability vote, to give L.A. County more time so it could finally break the cycle, “rather than continually putting us on 60-day timelines towards shutdown that are literally impossible to meet due to existing Union Memoranda of Understanding, DOJ oversight requirements, and other legal obligations.”
“While this may be somewhat in tension with existing statutory deadlines, we believe increased flexibility would allow the BSCC and DOJ to harmonize their requirements and timelines, and effectively work together with Probation towards the common goal of solving the hard problems that, to date, have limited Probation’s ability to bring about real and lasting change,” he wrote.
The BSCC wasn’t swayed and unanimously passed the vote to declare Los Padrinos and the SYTF unsuitable.