YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEM
REALIGNMENT WOBBLING
Even with the closure of California’s youth prisons and the state’s shift to a rehabilitation-first focus, justice advocates are still fighting to transform California’s juvenile legal system into the progressive model they envisioned.
New laws such as Senate Bill 823, which was endorsed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and signed in 2020, handed over the responsibility for youth offender detention and supervision to California’s 58 counties.
The realignment also promised to establish additional community-involved alternatives to incarceration.
Yet community advocates are having a difficult time ensuring that such changes are properly implemented, reports The Sacramento Bee. They are also concerned that counties are operating without proper oversight or transparency.
“The focus of this bill was supposed to be improving justice-impacted youth lives,” said Youth Forward organizer Nia Moore Weathers. “But when you are operating behind closed doors and when you are not allowing community involvement, it does not feel like that’s what is happening.”
Meredith Desautels, a staff attorney at the Youth Law Center, said, “Now is the time for the state to step in and make sure that this process doesn’t end up doing more harm than good.”
One of the issues identified by the Youth Law Center and other advocates was the lack of transparency by a multi-county nonprofit Consortium that was formed to work with chief probation officers to implement the realignment.
The Youth Law Center filed suit on behalf of advocates claiming that since the Consortium is run by county officials using public funds, it should have to adhere to public transparency laws in the same way as a public agency. Instead, they allege that the Consortium is hiding behind its nonprofit status to “withhold the public data it collects and sidestep state oversight and public scrutiny,” according to The Bee.
Abraham Medina, director of the California Alliance for Youth Justice, said, “My concern is that we’re seeing the creation of a shadow jury and justice system that operates outside of the public.”
However, county officials blamed the issue on the state’s accelerated deadline for developing and implementing the county-based realignment plan, saying they were only given a few months to prepare for an influx of youth offenders from the state’s closing youth prisons.
“It was not anything done in secret, just really trying to move as quickly as we can,” said Marlon Yarber, chief probation officer of Sacramento County.
The executive director of the Consortium, Elizabeth Siggins, said in a statement that the “baseless” lawsuit was a “distraction towards the collective work in identifying the gaps in treatment options for youth.”
Under the reforms, juvenile offenders are supposed to receive mental health care, placement closer to home and improvements to housing conditions. The reforms include funds to offer trauma-informed and culturally-based support services.
Yet a report by the Youth Law Center and the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center concluded that county juvenile halls “operated much like jails, relying on hardware and [static] control measures that are antithetical to developmentally-appropriate services for youth.” They noted that such facilities were also typically built for short pre-trail stays, not long-term incarceration or rehabilitation.
“Without community engagement, they’re just going to continue to center [on] their special interests instead of the best interests of the children that they’re supposed to care for,” Medina said.
To the extent that the concerns raised by advocates go uncorrected, it could impede the bill’s intended purpose and trigger a rise in youth incarceration, according to The Bee.
However, Yarber disagreed with the criticisms. “I think it’s a mischaracterization that we want to keep youth under our thumb. When we can effectuate releases safely and get youth on their way — recognizing that everyone’s made a mistake — we will pursue all of those options that are available.
