California turns toward rehabilitating juveniles

"The lawsuit and our subsequent investigation of what is working well in other states made us realize that what we need is a much more large-scale overhaul," says Elizabeth Siggins, assistant secretary for juvenile justice policy.

In addition to Missouri, state officials visited programs in Colorado, Washington, Texas, and Florida before fashioning their own model. Analysts say the state's racial and ethnic makeup will force designers to be more creative in producing programs that work.

"The whole country is really beginning to move toward the kinds of designs that California is now embracing," says Caren Leaf, director at Lookout Mountain Youth Service Center in Golden, Colo. "States are reframing their objectives with the premise that all these young criminal offenders end up back in local communities.... So the overwhelming need is for them to return different than when they left."

California and other states face several hurdles in moving toward a more rehabilitative model. One is funding. California has been struggling to overcome one of its biggest deficits in history. Lawmakers are being pulled in several directions as they look to cut programs from education to welfare.

"The price tag of such reforms is a potential stalling point," says David Steinhart, a California lawyer and juvenile-justice specialist. "If you try to reconfigure and rebuild existing facilities you have to go to the voters and that is a hurdle for the administration."

In the fight over costs, officials are telling lawmakers and citizens alike that programs that try to prevent recidivism are cheaper in the long run. "The concern we have is how much are these offenders going to cost if they come back to the prisons as adults when the cost is even greater," says Leaf.

Another hurdle is the prison culture itself. Many corrections officers worry about going too soft on a prison population that includes some of the state's toughest juvenile offenders. "There is enormous built-in resistance by most of the officers who have been trained, and spent their whole professional life in getting tough on crime," says Carl Mazza, a prison expert at Lehman College, part of the City University of New York. "Many will see that they are being asked to become soft on crime, and many politicians pushing this will be accused of it as well."

Others believe the punishment vs. rehabilitation debate ignores a larger struggle over social values. They say it leaves out discussion of reforming national attitudes about incarceration altogether - and the uneven percentages of blacks, Hispanics, and whites in prison. "Until you have the larger discussion on jobs, civil rights, it's hollow to talk about rehabilitation," says Barry Sanders, a historian at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif.

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