Grand jury blasts Sacramento County's lack of facilities for delinquent youth

The lack of long-term programs for Sacramento County’s troubled youth was at the center of a withering grand jury report released last month.

For young people who are detained for breaking the law and may need extended care, there is only one place to put them—the juvenile hall on Kiefer Boulevard.

Two treatment centers that provided long-term residential commitments and rehabilitation services closed in recent years due to budget cuts, though the grand jury found that the county Department of General Services “wasted” millions on maintaining the vacant properties.

Without the Warren E. Thornton Youth Center, closed in 2009, and the Sacramento County Boys Ranch, closed in 2010, “the Sacramento County Juvenile Court lost options, resources and facilities to house and treat long-term offenders,” the report states.

Detaining youths at juvenile hall or releasing them to home detention, formal probation or without any supervision provides “them little to no resources dedicated to long-term treatment and care,” the report continues.

Assistant chief probation officer Mike Shores said last week that the grand jury investigation would require the full analysis of a working group before any substantive responses could be made. The department has 90 days from the report's June 28 issuance to file its replies to the findings and recommendations, which ask the county to lease or sell the Boys Ranch property and convene a task force to examine reopening the youth center.

Shores did say the department was committed to its juvenile population. “Whatever we do, we want to do it rightly … and through good public practices,” he told SN&R.

Charlotte Siggins, who chaired the grand jury's criminal and juvenile-justice committee and was lead author on the report, acknowledged the crippling economic realities that resulted in the loss of county-run programs for juveniles. Between 2008 and 2011, probation reduced its staffing by 40 percent. “We did not feel that probation had been the culprit here at all,” she added. “The services they are able to offer are constrained considerably by not having these types of facilities.”

Siggins noted that juvenile hall—officially known as the youth-detention facility—was never intended to detain youths for more than 30 days. But the lack of alternative residential options has forced the way-station hall into acting as a penitentiary, with youths being incarcerated sometimes as long as three years. “Clearly these kids should be somewhere else,” she said, adding her belief that probation officials would say the same thing.

The jury's critical report follows 14 years of constriction when it comes to alternative housing options for delinquent youth. In 2000, a 22-bed family-reunification center that had taken in minors for three decades turned into a privately run group home. A relentless era of funding problems shuttered an early intervention center for 8- to 17-year-olds in 2008, the 50-bed youth center in 2009 and the Boys Ranch a year later.

A community-based intervention program for first-time juvenile offenders became entirely volunteer-run in 2009.

All these changes and contractions only steered more at-risk youths to juvie, which has lost its own wing to budget cuts and never fully realized a planned unit for special-needs cases. “[W]ith just warehousing, these youths are destined to become the next generation of inmates serving time in adult correctional facilities,” the report predicts.

In a separate paper, the grand jury expressed concern over the probation department's housing of suicidal juvenile-hall residents with nonsuicidal residents. The practice is apparently in place to have someone on hand to counsel a youth in crisis. Siggins said she understood the agency's reasoning, but found the practice “risky.”