More than a month after the state ordered Los Angeles County’s sole juvenile hall shut down due to paltry staffing, a judge has once again spared the troubled facility from immediate closure.
Superior Court Judge Miguel Espinoza punted a decision on whether to order Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall closed, seemingly swayed by having no good alternatives for where the roughly 230 youths housed inside should go instead.
All youth at the Downey facility have cases pending, including some connected to murders and other violent offenses. The Public Defender’s Office had suggested moving the youth to the county’s “camps,” which are considered more stable than the beleaguered hall, but typically reserved for young people whose cases have been adjudicated.
“You are asking the court to jump off a cliff into an experiment that would be conducted on these children,” Espinoza said at a court hearing Friday.
A state oversight board ordered the hall shut down by Dec. 12 because regulators repeatedly found there were not enough staff, subjecting the youth inside to unsafe conditions and spotty access to class, medical appointments and outdoor activities. Staff from the Los Angeles County Probation Department, which runs the facility, have said they don’t feel safe showing up to work, exacerbating dangerous conditions.
Most of the youths are between the ages of 15 and 18, but some are younger. There are nine 13-year-olds currently incarcerated, according to numbers provided by the Probation Oversight Commission, a county watchdog for the agency.
The county made clear it had no intention of closing the facility, arguing it would only increase the chaos and do little to solve the staffing issues at the root of the problem. The state shut down the county’s other two halls last year after similar issues with staffing and neighboring counties “uniformly declined” to house any of the youth currently at Los Padrinos, according to legal filings.
The public defender’s office put the issue in front of a judge, arguing the county was now detaining its clients in violation of state law.
“We’re dealing with children. I don’t care what they’ve done. They’re children,” Luis Rodriguez, chief of the juvenile division for the L.A. County public defender’s office, told the judge Friday.
Frank Santoro with the L.A. County district attorney’s office argued the probation department was making the necessary improvements and releasing youth inside would be reckless.
“No one should be released from juvenile hall,” he told the judge. “They’re doing the best they can.”
Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa did not attend the hearing. Kimberly Epps, his second-in-command, told the judge they’d made strides in improving staffing lately, including paying probation officers an hourly rate to be on standby and a recruiting campaign that included Spotify ads and billboards.
It wasn’t enough, argued Rodriguez with the public defender’s office.
“I’m asking the court: Call it,” he said. “Let’s not kick the can down the road.”
The hearing was continued to Feb. 14.