The Fate of Juvenile Hall

In late March of this year, it suddenly dawned on County CEO Carmel Angelo that Juvenile Hall was badly overbudget. Her initial reaction was to simply tell the Probation Department that she was slashing the Juvenile Hall budget to less than a third of its requested amount.

At the 2017-18 budget review in June of last year (2017) acting Chief Probation Officer Kevin Kelley’s $2.3 million Juvenile Hall budget was rubberstampted by Angelo and the Board, even though they knew that budgeting $450 per day per delinquent was more than triple the cost incurred per delinquent of neighboring counties. (And that doesn’t even mention an overrun of $400k over the already depleted budget that somehow wasn’t noticed until March.)

We’ll spare you another rant about the County’s absolute lack of basic departmental reporting which should have provided the basic info to catch this problem much earlier, and move on to next week’s Supes meeting where the Juvenile Hall budget problem is buried in a much larger budget presentation rather than being addressed by itself.

Lots of locals are against closing the Hall, saying that these “juveniles,” these “youth,” these “children” (ha-ha), shouldn’t be shipped out to, say, Sonoma County’s Hall where they would be farther from local family. They say there are more cost-effective models that would keep the Mendo Hall open, but they haven’t provided any so far.

Remember that Juvenile Hall is part of the Probation Department, which is paid for by the County but is lately flagrantly mis-managed by the Courts.

The Probation Department has undergone major management turmoil in the last year or two stemming from former Chief Probation Officer Pamela Markham’s libidinous carrying-on during work hours, which was either ignored or envied for months by her alleged supervisors at the Superior Court, who placed her on paid administrative leave while several hundred thousand dollars were thrown at outside lawyers “investigating” Markham's torrid desktop work habits while an acting CPO tried to run the department.

As the Markham farce played out at huge cost to taxpayers, a succession of overpaid interims and temps and actings also ignored or were ignorant of the huge cost increases and overruns at Juvenile Hall. (We note that the outside investigation/lawyers were not charged to the Probation Department’s budget either.)

Meanwhile, Mendo’s bloated and overlarge management staff gave itself raises which took another bite out of Probation and the Hall’s allocated budget, along with everything else.

Back in March none of the overpaid Supervisors asked how it was that the Juvenile Hall budget deficit had suddenly grown so large. Not one $84,000 per year supervisor asked how Juvenile Hall was going to slash their prior year’s budget. Not a single $84,000 a year supervisor asked to have the new Chief Probation Officer appear in front of the Board to explain the situation. Not one $84,000 a year supervisor asked for spending or cost-cutting options to be put on a future agenda.

Instead, the Board seemed satisfied with CEO Angelo’s comment at the end of the discussion of the item: “As we look at our costs going forward I think we’re really going to have to watch what we’re doing.” (Jesus Prayer optional while you consider the implications of the preceding statement.)

As usual, next week’s Supes budget agenda item includes a muddled, disorganized Probation “presentation” which addresses the Juvenile Hall problem, gathers up some miscellanous related data, but doesn’t really propose much.

We are told that Mendo has 89 juveniles on probation — 56 on formal probation, 22 on informal probation, and 11 “others.” And there are 30 juveniles who are “Title IV-E Eligible” (meaning Social Security pays part of their incarceration costs).

But the number of juveniles in the Hall is running pretty low at 10-15 at any given time (not counting a few from Lake County who are no longer being sent to Mendo because Lake County no longer is willing to pay Mendo’s exorbitant daily rate.) This begs the question of how costs could have escalated so quickly for the relatively small number of junior criminals in the Hall being overseen by way too many staffers.

Clearly the absence of competent Probation management resulted in the continuous hiring of friends of staff (the age old Mendo hiring strategy) without any consideration of the cost until Lake County finally said no more.

Instead of cutting  their budget by over two-thirds as previously mentioned, Probation is being given a slightly less drastic 44% of last year’s budget. But, according to the presentation, if the Mendo Hall stays open it will still cost an additional $1.3 million over the slashed allocated amount. 

A “Sonoma County Option” involves closure of the Hall and farming Mendo’s juveniles out to SoCo. 

The rest of the Probation presentation is your typical unhelpful list of this cost and that cost, but it’s so disorganized that it’s unclear which option the costs apply to. Obviously, the SoCo option will save money here and cost money there (more transportation, for example). But SoCo’s cost per day per delinquent isn’t all that much less than Mendo’s, so there doesn’t appear to be that much savings in that option.

The anonymous presentation seems to prefer keeping the Mendo Hall open but reducing its capacity to 20 “youth,” with corresponding staff reductions of half a dozen or so apparently unnecessary positions and a reduction of out of control overtime. This option would mean that fewer juveniles would be placed in the Hall. How this would work is not explained other than to say they’d remain “in their community.”

(Euphemism, as applied to under-age criminals, is always laughable. Juvenile Hall is a lock-up facility, and young people are placed there for the same reasons that older people are sequestered at the County Jail.)

It does not appear that any effort was made to look at different “models” as suggested by AV School Superintendent Michelle Hutchins a couple of weeks ago. You’d think that the Board would take Ms. Hutchins and her fellow Superintendents up on their offer to present those models before any decisions are made about the future of Mendo’s Juvenile Hall.

The prospects for the future are not helped by the Probation Department’s list of “Juvenile Hall FY 2017-18 Accomplishments.” First — first! — on their list: “Implemented Mindful Meditation and Yoga Program.”

---

(This report has been corrected to properly distinguish between Kevin Kelley (ey), current head of juvenile probation, formerly acting Chief Probation Officer, with Kevin Kelly (no ey) the Ukiah and frequent court psychologist.)