The Journey to 'Youth Justice Reimagined'
Creating public literacy and partnerships to enhance community involvement in LA County’s roadmap to decarceration
The 'L.A. Model’: A community vision for decarceration emerges
In 2014, more than 100 people participated in nearly 2 years of community meetings to develop a comprehensive and detailed design for a therapeutic approach to juvenile justice. They called this new approach the ‘LA Model,’ centering programming that would be meaningful to youth and staff, individualized to meet the specific traumas of each youth, and executed in an environment anchored in a ‘culture of care.’ In a remarkable collaboration that represented the community taking responsibility to address systemic failures that have long plagued LA County’s juvenile justice system, community volunteers collaborated with County and non-profit staff in sub-committees and other group processes. Together, they articulated the conditions necessary for youth transformation, specific recommendations to implement them, and even detailed daily routines and activities to create them.
The community visionaries of the LA Model grappled with the reality that prevailing notions of justice include judicial, legislative, and socially imposed orders to detain young people in secure settings. The authors of the ‘Culture of Care’ report emphasized that such settings are in fundamental tension with the therapeutic goals and rehabilitative mandates of the juvenile justice system. Community members also cautioned that the County’s investment in a new $50 million youth probation ‘campus’ in Malibu – designed to house these services in small, ‘home-like,’ environments – would ultimately be more successful in community-based settings, rather than institutional ones. Still, there was hope, and a broad constituency, committed to the LA Model as a transition step towards a decarcerated future.
In a 2021 editorial entitled, “The ‘LA Model’ of juvenile rehabilitation: Great in theory, untested in real life,” the LA Times described the failure to implement the sweeping and evidence-based community vision – or a return on the County’s $50 million expenditure for Campus Kilpatrick in Malibu – as a failure of governance. Citing an independent study of the stalled effort, the Times noted that “important elements of the program were dropped because they conflicted with the county status quo.” The Editorial Board concluded, ‘the County unnecessarily exacerbates its problems with a very short attention span, allowing its leaders to believe they have accomplished things that they have merely discussed.’
The PRIT and the POC: Building community levers for decarceration
In 2018, an umbrella of organizations calling themselves the ‘Probation Reform Coalition,’ anchored by several groups of formerly incarcerated youth and those directly impacted by the juvenile justice system, successfully demanded that decision-makers create an accountability mechanism to end the systemic problems in Los Angeles County’s Probation Department. On May 1st of that year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors established the ‘Probation Reform and Implementation Team (PRIT),’ charging 5 volunteer citizens to establish the design for a new civilian oversight body and define its powers to monitor the Probation Department. Additionally, the group was instructed to synthesize hundreds of recommendations that had been made over the years in multiple audits of the Probation Department and reports by academics, policy practitioners, and community processes into a ‘Probation Systemic Reform Plan.’
The PRIT held 15 public hearings across LA County and online on topics ranging from the conditions in juvenile facilities to budgeting and submitted its design for a new Probation Oversight Commission in June 2019. Later that year, the PRIT concluded in its Probation Systemic Reform Plan summary report that ‘the time has come to end youth incarceration in LA County,’ noting that, in addition to all the evidence reviewed, over 20 organizations across LA County signed a Probation Reform Coalition letter calling for an end to youth incarceration. The PRIT enumerated several steps to be taken towards this goal, beginning with separating youth probation services from the Probation Department and establishing a work group to guide the County in ‘transferring jurisdiction over youth whom are ineligible to be diverted altogether from the delinquency system, into a health or human services agency or to a new youth development department.’ The PRIT also envisioned that this new workgroup would guide the County to take a series of steps that included closing juvenile halls, diverting as many young people as possible to diversion services, building community housing alternatives to detention, and ‘shutting down all juvenile camps by 2025.’
Youth Justice Work Group: The Birth of 'Youth Justice Reimagined' (YJR), a decarceration road map
In August 2019, the Board of Supervisors commissioned the W. Haywood Burns Institute (BI), to lead a community civic engagement process to explore pathways to reimagine juvenile justice, including the PRIT’s recommendation to explore if a non-corrections entity could serve Court-involved youth. BI created a public engagement structure called the LA County Youth Justice Work Group, a subcommittee structure, and monthly meetings for the public to get involved in the next step of decarcerating the existing system. In Fall 2020, BI synthesized this community input to produce the “Youth Justice Reimagined‘ report which the Board of Supervisors adopted as a road map with distinct stages attached to recommended timelines to implement the community’s vision. Among its recommendations, the YJR road map contemplated shifting funds from the Probation Department to erect a new County department, which could serve as a vehicle for implementation of the various stages laid out in the YJR Road map. That first milestone was achieved in July 2022, when a Department of Youth Development (DYD) was inaugurated in Los Angeles County.
Since July 2021, the LA County BOS has relied on BI to convene a Youth Justice Advisory Group (YJAG) where any member of the community can get involved in the County’s youth justice transformation. With the establishment of the DYD in July 2022, the community’s point of engagement in the implementation of YJR, is a joint monthly DYD Steering Committee/Youth Justice Advisory Group meeting. Meanwhile, the Probation Oversight Commission (POC) continues to serve as a civilian oversight body tasked to serve as the liaison between the community and the Probation Department and meets twice per month. Meanwhile, Justice Deputies (staff members in each elected Supervisor’s office heading the criminal justice portfolio) meet weekly in a ‘Public Safety Cluster’ meeting on items that will be taken up at the following week’s LA County Board of Supervisors meeting. The BOS Meeting is held virtually and in person and is the point of engagement for more the 10 million LA County residents and their elected officials.
Our participatory action research and healing justice activities aim to support the community and policy makers working to implement the YJR road map, as well as create knowledge and increased public literacy about these issues. We encourage you to join former staff and former detainees of the existing and past regimes of youth incarceration to shape the historic effort to decarcerate California by learning about, engaging in, and producing knowledge about the future of youth justice in its largest county.
Partnerships with change-agents working to end youth incarceration
From supporting formerly incarcerated youth organizers to implement Youth Justice Reimagined in LA County to responding to the call from Native Hawaiians to join them in creating a global movement to replace all youth incarceration with indigenous healing and cultural practices
LAYUP Coalition
We partner with the Decolonization Work Group of LAYUP, anchored by Arts for Healing and Justice Network (AHJN). Our collaboration is centered on connecting LAYUP youth leaders with our Just Transition Fellows and retired corrections staff. Our work together is focused on mentorship and healing justice as well as policy analysis and applied research.
Our participants and the youth leaders from LAYUP are working together to shape a public event, entitled ‘Abolition in 3 Acts,’ which will (1) mark the shut-down of CA’s youth prisons, (2) highlight the state of youth justice in LA County, and (3) create awareness about Hawai’i’s indigenous-centered youth decarceration process.
Los Angeles Youth Uprising builds power through youth leadership, direct action organizing and policy advocacy to dismantle the racist juvenile justice system and divert its resources towards holistic models of youth development that ensure LA youth rise and thrive.
Kawailoa
In September 2023, we launched a learning journey to draw on the juvenile justice systemic reform efforts in the State of Hawai’i. Centering culture and indigeneity has led to an 80% reduction in the incarceration of youth across the state. Recently, the collaborative of community change agents that has been at the center of this indigenous-based transformation was selected as one of 5 Racial Equity 2030 grantees of the Kellogg Foundation, a global challenge to achieve racial equity by 2030.
Hawai’i aspires to generate ‘a worldwide movement to replace youth incarceration with Indigenous healing practices.’
Our partnership has consciously begun in a dialogue with Mark Kawika Patterson, a central figure in this transformation who is both an indigenous leader in the Native Hawaiian community and an official in the Hawaiian state corrections system.
This learning exchange integrates our focus on racial justice, wisdom from both formerly detained youth and staff, and our intention to ground YJR implementation in decolonization approaches.
Rising Scholars Network
We support the community and policy effort to expand the youth healing work-force and shrink the youth carceral workforce by equipping colleges to serve justice-impacted youth. Several of our program participants (both former staff and former youth detainees) are community college students/alumni and one of our participants is a community college educator.
The State of California has launched a Juvenile Justice Grants Program 2023 – 2028 to resource state community colleges to bring higher education pathways to incarcerated youth within detention facilities and to serve justice-involved youth after incarceration.
The Legislature allocated these funds after its state law (AB 417) required the community college system to serve incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth through a ‘Rising Scholars Network.’ We equip participants to inform the grants program implementation as a crucial component of CA’s ‘youth realignment’ efforts (SB 823) aimed at supporting local communities to heal youth.