This is the third in a four-part series looking into the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles, as told by people who work there. It’s a world where youth convicted of violent felonies are said to control the jails, while law enforcement is helpless to stop it due to defunding and downgrades to formerly strict laws.
It’s 6 a.m. and time for the first shift at Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall. The probation officer has clocked in, donned protective gear, and is ready to walk into the battle zone.
He’s wondering if inmate X, who was in a foul mood yesterday, will give him career-ending injuries today over not getting an extra lunch tray. But if the officer is lucky enough to escape a hospital stint, he will face injuries of a different sort — intense internal review and possible punishment by the Probation Oversight Commission over deemed excessive force to protect himself.
This is a typical day at work for hundreds of Probation Department officers who guard a violent population of juveniles in four outdated facilities constructed for lesser crimes than murder, carjacking, and rape.
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The Washington Examiner interviewed two probation officials to discover what a typical day is like for the men and women who operate the juvenile justice system of approximately 400 inmates. They describe a bleak job with dwindling numbers of colleagues retiring under medical issues, stress, and PTSD.
For those left behind, they work either in a camp with lower-level offenders or a jail housing the most violent. For the jail, it’s typically one officer assigned to a large pod where 15 individual cells are located within a larger day room. Day in and day out, officers are assigned to the same group of teenagers and spend an entire shift inside the pods except for when teenagers attend school or have an hourlong break outside.
“When you leave a shift there, you are destroyed,” said a probation manager. “It is so volatile and unsafe. If someone gets injured by these inmates, they will come back to the same facility with the same juveniles.”
It is a system in which the inmates rule the jails and the outnumbered officers guarding them are kept safe only due to the goodwill of the teenagers in their care. Broken noses, fractured spines, dislocated limbs, and other injuries are common, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors treats this as part of the job by cutting staff and disallowing nonlethal force, the manager said.
INSIDE LA’S OUT-OF-CONTROL JUVENILE JAILS WHERE VIOLENCE RULES
The manager described the jail population as the most hardened killers and criminals who have done crimes such as raping and killing an 80-year-old woman in her home and then stealing her car. Another inmate is a double murder defendant. Others are gang members who torture their victims before killing them.
“The only kids we have detained are the most violent, aggressive, assaultive kids who have created the most heinous crimes against society,” the manager said.
Board Chairwoman Holly Mitchell and Probation Oversight Commission Chairman Franky Carrillo did not respond to requests for comment.
According to jail insides, officers spend 8-16 hours locked in with inmates armed only with their wits and a two-way radio. They eat meals with the inmates and take no breaks unless they have to use the restroom — then, a call is placed for a backup officer to fill in for five minutes.
“Multiple times a day, we are threatened — it could be over not getting extra food or not liking the pair of pants they were issued,” the manager said. “It’s over the stupidest thing. Every day we spend trying to figure these kids out because we have been put in such a bad position from the board, which doesn’t have our back.”
Officers told the Washington Examiner that any use-of-force incident is investigated with a “guilty until proven innocent” mindset and they will be fired, then spend another three years trying to get their jobs back. It is easier to let minor incidents go rather than intervene in every infraction, officers say.
Then, when it’s time for school, teachers do their best to quell any behavior problems, but the officers make sure no violence erupts. Each student is assigned a laptop with an intranet for in-class use only.
The students are also given Wi-Fi passwords to use back in their cells to communicate with the outside world. This is allegedly often used to place orders for drugs, which are thrown over facility walls and retrieved when inmates are outside for their hour of exercise, an officer and the manager said.
Students have no incentive to learn and often bully teachers who respond by giving out candy or extra credit toward graduation, a commission report revealed.
The report blamed the lack of student cooperation in learning on a “carceral setting [and] poor quality and inconsistency of classroom instruction.”
Classrooms where the most violent offenders attend school are inside a larger locked cell block for the protection of others. Lower-level offenders are allowed to attend school in a setting that looks like any other high school in America, the manager said.
“They are not in there because they won the honor roll or spelling bee,” the manager said. “These are violent felons. We’ve had kids break through wooden doors to get into another room to attack other inmates.”
Once back in the housing quarters, the inmates usually play video games or watch television. Any fights, including assaults on staff, result in four hours of cell detention. Then, the offender is allowed back in the day room. The Washington Examiner viewed graphic photos of one officer with blood gushing from her nose. Another had an apparent leg fracture, and a third was punched in the eye and had a swollen socket and bruising.
Women officers are treated the worst, with constant taunts of sexual assault. The abuse is daily and violates county standards against sexual harassment and abuse, but nothing is done to fix the situation by the board, the manager said.
When women have filed complaints, insiders say nothing happens.
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“They don’t investigate. The perception is they work in this environment and have to put up with it,” the manager said.
At the end of the shift, when it’s time to go home, officers will often be told they need to stay on the job for another eight hours because of staff shortage.
“You may show up at 5:30 [a.m.], get off at 10:30 [p.m.], and go home only to be back at 6 the next morning,” the manager said. “All because we haven’t been able to hire anybody.”
The county is in a hiring freeze and has not exempted law enforcement. Officials estimate a loss of 700 officers over the past several years.
