California Moves to Close the Division of Juvenile Justice
By Matt Roby
Starting in July 2021, juvenile court judges will no longer have the option to sentence youth to serve time in one of California’s juvenile prisons.
Within the 2020-2021 California State Budget enacted by Governor Gavin Newson this June, the executive announced the plan to phase out the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), the department that has been in charge of California’s youth prison systems for almost 20 years. Starting in July 2021, juvenile judges can no longer sentence youth to the DJJ, and the remaining state facilities are scheduled to be closed by 2023.
Newsom originally budgeted for the DJJ to be moved from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to the Health and Human Services Agency to reform and better rehabilitate youth. When COVID-19 created state budget shortfalls, Newsom issued an amended budget proposal in May 2020, planning to eliminate the DJJ. This would redistribute the responsibilities of housing the state’s incarcerated youths among the individual counties. Newsom’s proposed budget was adopted into Senate Bill 823 and passed by the legislature.
“I think that this could be a good thing if handled well and implemented responsibly,” Frankie Guzman, Director of the Youth Justice Initiative at the National Center for Youth Law, said. “But it also has the potential for becoming an absolute failure and causing a lot of pain to young people and their communities.”
Guzman said he is concerned these decisions were made due to financial constraints rather than progressive policy rationale, opening the door for a variety of potential pitfalls and unintended consequences.
“I don’t believe the counties are in a position to care in a responsible way for these young people,” Guzman said. “I think they have already shown a disinclination to deal with young people with high levels of need, favoring either a transfer to the adult system or commitment to the state system of DJJ.”
Stacey Capps, Santa Clara County Assistant District Attorney, said now that the system will completely stop accepting new inmates by next summer, youth offenders face a greater chance of serving their sentences in adult prisons. Without the option of DJJ, the smaller counties that already lack the funding and infrastructure to provide much-needed services will often find themselves opting for the adult system in order to relieve the burden.
Photo by Milad B. Fakurian on Unsplash.
“In a county where you have very few youthful offenders, there is no way you can create programs to address specific needs,” Capps said. “Those individuals won’t be afforded the opportunity to be rehabilitated in their own county, so the options are to send them to another county or to send them up to adult court.”
One major concern is that the rigid dichotomy of both political and policing ideologies across the state will cause youth offenders themselves to become subject to the constraints of geographical justice.
W. David Ball, Professor of criminal law at Santa Clara University School of Law, expressed concern that judges and probation departments in more conservative jurisdictions will continue to prefer incarceration instead of more forward thinking, evidence-based practices, that involve community intervention and social services.
“I worry that other counties--and these tend to be counties that use the criminal legal system to solve their problems--will want to reproduce the state prison experience with even fewer resources and less space,” Ball said. “And that would be a terrible outcome.”
In order to combat this line of thinking, the DJJ will be replaced by the new Office of Youth Justice to provide oversight across the state. The new office will have the power to revoke funding from probation departments that do not meet the expected standards and to increase costs for counties that favor placing youths in the adult system.
However, some believe that the legislation was pushed through too fast and that many counties are unprepared for the challenges that lie ahead. Capps said she worries that Santa Clara County is not ready for the influx of youth found to commit serious offenses who require substantial amounts of treatment, intervention, and programming.
“We still need to decide where we are going to house them, what programs we need in order to rehabilitate them. We need to hire people to facilitate those programs, and we need to think about how we are going to integrate our most violent youthful offenders with the less violent offenders,” Capps said.
Without anywhere to currently send youth with high levels of need, advocates are concerned that departments already lacking money and resources will be further hindered by the financial toll of sending a youth to adult prison, with the annual cost ranging from $12,000 to $36,000 depending on the facility.
Going forward, Guzman said he would like to see more investment in evidence-based practices that seek to enhance the environment and programs provided by probation departments that are conducive to rehabilitative success.
“The format has been adapted to allow for this realignment, but the substance has not even been invested upon,” Guzman said. “Educators need to be at the table. Public health officials, social services, and community-based organizations all need to be at the table and have more skin in the game.”
Ball said he believes that politics are perhaps the largest hindrance in putting these experts in the driver’s seat and advancing positive change in the justice system. He said that a cultural, social, and political conversation is needed to change the public stigma that surrounds why young people commit crimes and how we should punish them.
“This is a political and social problem,” Ball said. “What this depends on is an engaged electorate at the local level.”
(Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the October 2020 [Volume 51, Issue 1] edition of The Advocate.)