LA County juvenile hall back in state’s crosshairs over misleading documents given to inspectors

State inspectors have found the troubled Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall out of compliance with California’s minimum standards for the second time in a year after inspectors discovered Los Angeles County falsely said it had provided programs and activities for juveniles that, in fact, did not occur.

State regulations require juvenile facilities to dedicate at least an hour per day to helping juveniles better themselves and to reducing recidivism. L.A. County appeared to be hitting those goals on paper before inspectors reviewed surveillance footage, according to a recent state inspection report.

“A review of video on randomly selected days in June indicates that many programs indicated on the facility schedule and documented on facility activity logs … did not occur,” inspector Lisa Southwell wrote. “Additionally, when a scheduled and documented program was observed on video, there were many times that the duration of the program did not match the time indicated on documentation.”

Youth told inspectors that some of the juvenile hall’s units offered more robust programs than others. Videos reviewed also showed youth “laying on benches or on the floor rather than engaging in any activity.”

The finding of noncompliance puts Los Padrinos back in the crosshairs of the Board of State and Community Corrections, the regulatory body responsible for overseeing California’s jails and juvenile halls, and automatically triggers a process that, if not resolved within the next 150 days, could lead to the forced closure of the juvenile hall.

Los Angeles County narrowly avoided that exact fate for Los Padrinos just four months ago. Then, the BSCC identified 12 areas of noncompliance, but the county, through a gambit that redeployed more than 200 probation officers at the expense of other parts of the department, managed to clean up the deficiencies ahead of the deadline.

Critics have long criticized California’s regulations for creating a perpetual cycle of dysfunction because the clock for closing a facility is reset every time a facility regains compliance, no matter how short lived.

Los Angeles County’s two former juvenile halls, Barry J. Nidorf and Central, lost and regained compliance repeatedly over a roughly two-year period before the state took the unprecedented action of shutting those facilities down last year. Los Padrinos, which was reopened in July 2023 to house the displaced juveniles, failed its first inspection a month later.

In April, the appointed board members of the BSCC voted to allow Los Padrinos to stay open, but expressed concerns about L.A. County’s ability to maintain compliance in light of an ongoing staffing crisis. Los Padrinos continues to rely on redeployed field officers as roughly half of the juvenile hall’s employees are on leave. The BSCC has conducted twice-monthly inspections — announced and unannounced — at Los Padrinos since April.

“No way should this be considered by anybody in our virtual audience, or in this room, as ‘Mission Accomplished’ by L.A.,” said BSCC Chair Linda Penner, a former chief probation officer for Fresno County, at the time.

In response to concerns, the BSCC general counsel previously told the panel he believed it could truncate the timeline — which usually takes seven months in total from beginning to end — to quickly deem the facility “unsuitable” for the confinement of juveniles if it failed another inspection.

That, however, did not seem to be the plan when the BSCC discussed Los Padrinos’s noncompliance at its monthly meeting on Thursday, July 11.

Staff and board members described the new finding against Los Padrinos as “troubling” and “terrible” during a presentation, but did not take any action. L.A. County has until Aug. 27 to provide a “corrective action plan,” or CAP, to address the finding and then up to 90 days to implement it, likely pushing any action out to November.

If the BSCC does not accept the corrective action plan, Los Padrinos would have to close within 60 days and could no longer be used to house juvenile offenders.

Allison Ganter, the deputy director of the BSCC’s Facilities Standards and Operations division, told the board Los Angeles County is internally investigating the misleading documents provided to inspectors.

“They will be working through their internal administrative process to address, what I would say is, a terrible finding,” Ganter said. “We’ll continue to keep the board apprised of this issue and the outcome of the continued inspections at the facilities.”

The Los Angeles County Probation Oversight Commission has brought up their own concerns about the accuracy of Los Padrinos’ schedules for months. Commissioner Milinda Kakani visited the facility threes time since April and found that staff and youth in seven different units had never heard of “forward thinking journals,” though the activity — designed to help youth work through their feelings and make changes to their behavior — filled hours of each day’s calendar. She previously raised the issue in May and raised it again at the POC’s meeting last week during a presentation by Probation Chief Deputy Kimberly Epps.

“This is about the fact that on a calendar you have things written like ‘forward thinking journals’ or mobile library, or art, that are literally made up programs when you go into the unit, and nobody, whether it’s the young people or the staff, have any idea what you’re talking about,” Kakani said to Epps.

Epps denied the schedules are “made up,” but did not offer an explanation for the discrepancies found during inspections. She pledged to look into the use of forward-thinking journals.

As for the BSCC’s finding, Epps acknowledged the county is out of compliance again. Probation is working on its corrective action plan and already planned to add new activities at Los Padrinos in the near future, she said.

“I can simply state that we’re going to continue to work towards maintaining and getting that compliance and meeting the CAP,” Epps said.