SYSTEM HARDENS YOUTHS

Punishment, Fear for Safety 'Dehumanizes' Juveniles in State Facilities,
Experts Say

California's youth prison system attempts to reform offenders by blasting
them with powerful chemicals, confining them in cages, and keeping wards
locked down 23 hours a day.

The punishments are the most severe in the country -- and perhaps the most
ineffective -- according to experts who have just completed a year's review
of the California Youth Authority.

Their reports, commissioned by state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, drew
wide attention last week for their revelation that some wards were kept in
cages. But a closer look at these and other studies indicates that the
mental health and crime experts, Stanford University psychiatrists and
Office of the Inspector General who produced them have reached a common and
far more important conclusion:

Inside the Youth Authority's 10 lockups, the climate of violence,
punishment and fear makes young people more likely -- not less -- to resort
to violence themselves.

It's impossible to help delinquents turn their lives around in an
environment where all they can think about is surviving another day, the
experts said.

That environment produced Michael Howard, an emotionally disturbed
20-year-old from Sunnyvale, found near death in his cell at a Youth
Authority institution in September, where he had attempted to hang himself
to avoid being "sold" by other inmates for sex. It created Robert Bench,
now 21, who once worked full time at a South Bay Home Depot but emerged
from a year-and-a-half sentence for theft and vandalism with 5-inch
swastikas tattooed on both sides of his chest.

A Case in Point

The Youth Authority also produced Mawueina Taylor of Fresno, whose unit
rioted the week he arrived at age 17, with wards slinging batteries stuffed
in socks and stabbing one another with shards of glass they yanked from
broken windows. After three years and numerous Macings, Taylor was
released. Two years later, he was back for violating parole, angrier than ever.

"The YA system? You get worse in there," said Taylor, a onetime De Anza
College football star. To prove his point, he pointed to a picture of five
of his "homies" at the Preston Correctional Facility in Ione: One dead,
another shot repeatedly; three in adult prison.

The Youth Authority mirrors adult prisons, only the inmates aren't adults.
They range in age from 12 to 25; the vast majority are teenagers whom the
state, by law, is required to treat and rehabilitate. To many, they may be
young, but they are teenage predators who have murdered and raped. Yet some
landed in the system because they have long records of non-violent crimes
such as petty theft and marijuana use.

Christopher Siegle, a 21-year-old from Walnut Creek, was released late last
year after serving two years for theft and drug use. He overdosed 45 days
after he was released and 48 hours later, while still under the influence,
held up a grocery store with a BB gun.

In an interview from a jail in Richmond relayed through his father, Siegle
said he emerged from the Youth Authority a "confused, depressed person" who
survived two years in a climate where wards are continually "jumped,
stabbed and preyed upon."

According to a report written by Tennessee juvenile justice consultant
Jerry Thomas, the Youth Authority "depersonalizes and dehumanizes" wards,
most of whom grew up in chaotic, abusive households, and nearly all of whom
have diagnosable mental disorders. Children of drug addicts who bounce from
one foster home to the next, victims of sexual and physical abuse, had gone
on to become victimizers themselves.

The California Youth Authority was created to break this violent cycle;
instead, it both intensifies and accelerates it, the reports concluded.

Howard committed his first major offense at 16, when he fondled his
13-year-old girlfriend on a school bus. They were both attending special
education classes; he had been diagnosed "severely emotionally disabled" by
the school district, with personality, attachment and attention-deficit
disorders.

Taylor was raised by a drug-addicted mother and a network of aunts and
uncles, all of whom shot heroin. He had moved 17 times before he became
homeless at age 15.

Bench had watched his father commit suicide by shooting himself in the head.

In the Youth Authority, "there is no opportunity to change, or to learn how
to develop healthy and normal relationships," according to a September 2003
report that analyzed treatment for sex offenders. Even the special programs
"at best will teach them how to behave," the report stated. At worst, it
"encourages rebellion and teaches anti-social behavior."

Some Relief Sought

State officials agree with the findings and are pledging immediate action.

But some 2,500 Youth Authority staffers feel tarred by the reports and not
credited for their work handling the state's toughest youth offenders.
Patti Padmore, a youth parole agent, said budget cuts have led to
overcrowding, making it even more difficult for staff to maintain calm.
Padmore would welcome a relief from the daily violence, so that wards could
"let their guard down and actually be a kid sometimes, instead of a
gangbanger."

And Lance Corcoran, executive vice president of the California Correctional
Peace Officers Association, said fear in institutions isn't all bad. It can
motivate a person never to return.

Researchers dispute that premise.

In interviews with 100 inmates, Barry Krisberg of the National Council on
Crime and Delinquency found "few youths felt that the YA was a safe place
to be confined" and "expressed tremendous fears for their safety." Open
dorms, which house as many as 75 youths, are the most dangerous, but fights
often break out in cafeterias, classrooms and even chapels.

Wards who feel threatened join gangs to feel safe, and they perpetuate
brutality and racial strife through a practice known as "lighting." Youths
designated by other inmates as "green lighted" or "black lighted" are
targets for attacks by Latino or African-Americans. It is open season on
the "rainbow lighted," who are targets for all races.

In a 2003 analysis of six institutions, there were an average of 10
ward-on-ward assaults each day, including sexual attacks.

Poorly trained staff react to this with force, Mace and the use of cages
and isolation.

The wards fight back. Staff members are often subjected to "gassing" --
where an inmate hurls blood, urine or feces in their faces -- when they
emerge from 23-hour lockdowns.

Preventive strategies are "either non-existent or very rudimentary," said
the general corrections review of the California Youth Authority.

At times, guards use tactics that are designed to quell riots, shooting
chemical agents from high-powered weapons into small rooms, according to
Krisberg's report, enhancing the risk of burns and asphyxiation.

The Mentally Ill

Taylor, now 28 and living with his wife and infant daughter, remembered,
"It's like someone's on top of you choking you and putting vinegar in your
eyes," he said. "It suffocates you."

The Youth Authority's failure to treat its mentally ill and
substance-abusing population has been under fire for years. Stanford
researchers in 2001 found an "extremely high prevalence" of psychiatric
conditions, with 71 percent of males suffering from three to five
diagnosable disorders. Eighty-two percent of the female population had
three to nine diagnosable disorders.

Yet, in confidential documents obtained by the Mercury News, the inspector
general found in 2002 that mental health treatment was consistently
"substandard." Suicidal wards dressed only in smocks are cuffed and
confined in monitored cells but at times, the video cameras are broken.

The vast majority of wards receive no treatment at all. Psychiatrists
conduct superficial assessments and are quick to prescribe powerful
anti-psychotic drugs, sometimes as many as eight medications at a time.
Routinely, however, they do no follow-up examinations to determine the
success or side effects of the drugs.

Treatment plans are sloppy and lack critical information, the state's
investigative arm found. Families are not notified of their children's
mental state, or how to help them when they are released. The September
report, one of a series commissioned in the wake of a lawsuit, found that
900 sexually abusive wards were paroled with no treatment. The few sex
offenders who were treated were enrolled in programs that "did not meet
currently recognized standards of practice in the field."

The inspector general found that there was no justification for medicating
22 percent of youths studied, and critical notes were missing from patient
files, such as a boy's comments to staff that the medicine made him want to
kill himself.

In a 2001 report titled "Out of Sight, Out of Mind," Fresno child welfare
researcher Nancy Richardson stated that "neither mawkish sentimentality,
nor an unapologetic focus on punishment gets us to the core of the issue.

"These delinquents all come back to live among us," she wrote. "None of us
will be unaffected."