By Mike Males
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and justice reformers deserve praise for taking on the hard politics necessary to finally close the state’s scandal-ridden, violent, lawsuit-papered Division of Juvenile Justice (formerly California Youth Authority). The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice’s just-released report* of pictures, text, and inmate interviews documents why the closure of California’s Youth Bastille is long overdue.
The report, “Beyond Repair,” culminates CJCJ’s series of intensive investigations into the “shameful past” and present of the 132 years of state juvenile prisons whose inmates suffered “widespread abuse within a culture that normalized violence and left them with lasting trauma.” The heavily documented report is a chronicle of why DJJ’s prisons, like hellholes across the country, should have gone the way of dinosaurs decades ago.
Why, then, did it take until June 30, 2023, for these unfixable, brutal, exorbitantly costly youth warehouses to be emptied?
DJJ’s prisons finally closed last week for one simple reason: barely anyone is in them.
Teenagers shut down DJJ. California’s younger Millennials and Generation Z have done what experts insist brainless, impulsive teenagers cannot possibly do: they stopped committing crimes.
Think that’s preposterous, given the herd-journalism barrage of “youth violence” stories infesting every media outlet? Just check Table 16, page 22, of the California Department of Justice’s just-released Crime in California 2022 report. There, you will see in tiny-print numbers a social miracle so terrifying to established interests and sensational media they can’t even talk about it.
In 1974, a record-high 408,000 Californians under age 18 were arrested for criminal offenses. In 1995, 262,000. In 2010, 186,000. In 2019, 43,000. In 2022, 26,000. Thirty years ago, 500 to 700 California youth were arrested for murder every year. In 2022, 94.
This is not a joke or serial typos. Many fewer Californians under age 20 are arrested these days than graying midlifers ages 50-59. This massive crime plummet occurred as the state’s teenage population grew by 1 million and transitioned from three-fourths Euro-White in 1970 to three-fourths of Color today. Nothing crime experts predict or say about youth and crime has proven true.
No youth crime, no youth lockup. From a peak of 10,000 youths in state facilities in 1995, fewer than 700 remained in 2020, when Gov. Newsom decided to shutter the whole system. DJJ’s costs had soared to over $400,000 per ward per year, more than a top San Francisco hotel suite. Eight of 11 state youth prisons had closed, as had dozens of local juvenile halls and camps that once housed over 11,000 inmates, but just 2,500 by 2022. The state DJJ budget plunged by 75%, saving Californians $10 billion in taxes over the last 25 years.
California not only incarcerates far fewer youth today, it has stopped policing them. Fifty years ago, California cops arrested 200,000 youths a year for “status offenses” (crimes caused by being a teenager, particularly a girl) like truancy, curfew, running away, and “delinquent tendencies.” Twenty years ago, 40,000 youths were still being arrested for status offenses. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1,100.
Never have more racially diverse teenagers been on California streets not locked up or busted, and never has California had lower rates of youth crime, violence, school dropout, early pregnancy, and college failure than in the 2020s. That reality utterly demolishes right-wing, law’n’order, more cops-and-prisons hardliners and has driven law enforcement interests and the press to frantic crusades to inflame every school fistfight, knife-carrying, and incidents miles and weeks apart into a “new crisis.”
You’d think progressives would be shouting these successes of diversity and reform from the rooftops. Yet, the liberal-left is not just silent, but mired in slandering today’s young as immature and crime-prone. The Sentencing Project’s recent claim (“brain immaturity fuels delinquency… lack of brain maturity makes lawbreaking and other risky behaviors more common during adolescence”) sounds downright silly amid 2022’s realities, but such 19th century “biodeterminist” mythology remains disturbingly common.
The fact that youth are a mere commodity, a fearsome free-fire zone to bolster popularity and funding with whatever wild distortions interests can muster, means it took political guts for Gov. Newsom and relentless work by advocates to finally shut down DJJ. They are well aware that every time a teenager has an overdue library book, inflamers will accuse them of coddling youth savages.
Now, attention will turn to monitoring California’s counties, which now manage the few youths still coming into the system. Some counties, such as Los Angeles, have no better record than DJJ did.
Closing backwards juvenile probation departments and exploring alternatives like the California Conservation Corps’ taking over empty juvenile detention camps and one of the few good juvenile justice models, Pine Grove Conservation Camp, promises a dynamic new collaboration that addresses crime, education, job-training, and climate-change challenges instead of simply warehousing and punishing.
*Disclaimer: I’m a CJCJ consultant but did not participate in this report.