California's Children

Sex traffickers target LA County foster kids: Probation Dept. fights back

May 9, 2012: Over one-third of the juvenile prostitutes who were in police custody at some point during 2010 -- the most recent year for which data is available -- had "ties" to the Los Angeles Dept. of Children and Family Services. The tie? They've been in foster care.

This month, with the help of a $1 million grant received in January from the US Dept. of Health & Human Services, the LA County Probation Department (LACPD) is initiating "My Life, My Choice," a national program, developed in Massachusetts to identify and support girls in foster care who are most vulnerable to being victims of sexual exploitation and human trafficking. 

Susan Abram, reporting for the Los Angeles Daily News on child sex trafficking in LA County, writes that each trafficked girl can earn up to $140,000 a year for a southland pimp; there is believed to be at least 17 main boulevards where young prostitutes are rotated.

In Los Angeles County, two administrators at the LACPD with social welfare educations, Michelle Guymon, at left, and Hania Cardenas, have "gone above and beyond their regular duties...to shine a light on [juvenile sex trafficking] and advocate for rehabilitation and healing...," in the words of LA County Supervisor Don Knabe [Long Beach-South Bay], who addressed the issue in January 2012, and supported the LACPD's efforts to establish a special unit dedicated to sexually exploited minors, for which Guymon is now the project manager.

In the LACPD program, more than 500 staff and community foster care providers have been trained to raise awareness and identify and support sexually exploited girls. Personal protection is also offered for  girls who are willing to testify against the pimps (even though this protection may mean housed in detention or sent to a juvenile camp).

From LA Daily News:

The data [from Guymon and Cardenas's research].... showed that of the 174 girls brought in for prostitution, 92% were African American, while 84% were from the Long Beach, South Los Angeles, Hawthorne, Inglewood, Compton and Torrance areas....

Most of the girls are also between 13 and 17, but many enter prostitution at age 12, Cardenas said. And the form of exploitation continues to grow.

"Online exploitation has increased," Cardenas said. "I think that the pimps are getting younger. Some of them are in gangs. And many of them will promise girls to be in videos. There's all kinds of recruitment tactics."

Cardenas and Guymon also presented data to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The board in April voted unanimously to support the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act (CASE), a state ballot initiative to strengthen penalties against human traffickers, add fines to fund victim services, and require that all sex offenders disclose Internet accounts. (It will also remove barriers to prosecute child sex traffickers, mandate training for law enforcement, and protect victims in court proceedings).

If passed by voters in November, CASE would be the toughest human trafficking law in the country, said Knabe [Long Beach-South Bay] who supported the measure. 

Initial reporting on sex trafficking in Los Angeles County among "young girls who may have a history in the foster care system or absent parents" was done by Janet D. Kelly on The Urban Perspective.

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.

Inner city kids have higher rates of PTSD than combat veterans

May 8, 2012: Youth living in inner cities show a higher prevalence of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) than soldiers, according to Howard Spivak M.D., at left, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Violence Prevention, who presented research showing that children are essentially “living in combat zones” at a Congressional briefing held April 27, 2012, in Washington D.C.

Michael Karpman reported on the briefing sponsored by the Congressional Tri-Caucus and the Prevention Institute’s Urban Networks to Increase Thriving Youth (UNITY) in the blog CitiesSpeak.org for the National League of Cities (NLC).

Among other findings shared at the briefing were:

• Children’s exposure to violence not only has serious mental health consequences, but is also linked with a range of chronic illnesses, including heart and lung diseases and diabetes.  Neuroscientists have found that this type of trauma changes how chromosomes form, hinders brain development, and may shorten a person’s life expectancy by 7-10 years.
• The 2009 National Survey of Children Exposed to Violence – conducted as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Initiative – found that 60% of children were exposed to violence within the previous year.
• Homicide is the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10-24.  In many cities, it is the leading cause (e.g., San Francisco).

... some cities are making substantial progress in reducing youth violence... by redefining violence as an issue of public health...treating and combating violence as a preventable disease.

The perception of violence as both a criminal justice issue and a public health epidemic appears to be spreading...

Twenty cities (including Oakland, Salinas, Richmond, and San Diego) belong to the UNITY City Network and are using the UNITY Road Map as a framework ...for policy and programs....

Since 2007, thirteen cities in California (Fresno, Los Angeles (San Fernando Valley), Oakland, Oxnard, Richmond, Sacramento, Salinas, San Bernardino, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, Santa Rosa, and Stockton) have developed comprehensive gang prevention action plans as part of their participation in the California Cities Gang Prevention Network, an initiative sponsored by NLC and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (based in Oakland).  

Written for California's Children By Elizabeth J Carlyle.

San Diego juvvie facilities: is pepper spray the go-to solution?

May 3, 2012:  Reporter Dave Maass, at left, writing for San Diego City Beat, has posted an investigative report on the use of pepper spray in San Diego juvenile facilities -- for starters, 461 incidents in 2011, which places San Diego as  one "of the highest levels of pepper-spray usage [in the U.S.]." The East Mesa juvenile facility recorded an average of five sprayings a week.

According to the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators (CJCA), only 14 states allow the use of pepper spray in juvenile facilities, but in most cases, it’s a last-resort measure, limited to riot-level emergencies. Only five of those states, including California, allow staff to carry it on their person, as is the case in San Diego. CJCA notes in its 2011 report on the issue that no studies have been conducted on the safety of using pepper spray on juveniles and that most juvenile correctional agencies shun its use “because of the harm it causes to youths and the negative impact on staff-youth relationships.” ....

In corrections terminology, OC spray is considered a “chemical restraint,” because a face-full of oleoresin capsicum—which is derived from the resin of red peppers—can be as debilitating as a pair of shackles. Under California law, it’s classified as a form of tear gas.....

In recent years, many states have voluntarily traded OC spray for ... techniques designed to de-escalate conflicts. For other jurisdictions, it’s taken lawsuits, federal investigations and court orders. In 2006, San Diego County Probation told The San Diego Union-Tribune that it was weighing sweeping revisions to its pepper-spray policies after a prisoner-rights group threatened legal action.

...San Diego County continues to embrace OC spray, even as nearby Los Angeles County's three juvenile halls have reduced usage from 1,431 OC  incidents in 2001 to just 91 incidents in 2011 in the wake of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. San Diego's two juvenile halls experienced 378 incidents in 2011, four times as many for a population half the size. On average, there’s an OC incident in a San Diego juvenile facility every 20 hours. ...If you compare L.A. County's juvenile halls to just San Diego's juvenile halls, the disparity becomes even more stark. L.A. County recorded 91 OC incidents in its three facilities, which have a daily population of roughly 1,130. San Diego County recorded 378 OC incidents in its two facilities, with an average daily population of 517. That means San Diego facilities experienced more than four times as many incidents, even though the juvenile hall populations are less than half the size of L.A.'s....

"That’s a very high number,” John Rhoads, a former top-level juvenile-detention official in both Sacramento and Santa Cruz counties, says of East Mesa. ...Rhoads is currently a Reno-based consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which developed the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a set of standards aimed at reforming juvenile-justice systems to reduce overcrowding and recidivism, as well as the strain on government budgets. Currently, 150 jurisdictions in 32 states are implementing the standards, which also call for banning the use of OC spray....

But the sheer number of OC incidents may indicate that pepper spray is not the when-all-else-fails tool that the county claims. Of the 461 incidents, 67 were classified as “non-fight,” which covers situations such as escape attempts, suicidal behavior or a youth “instigating others to fight,” as well as accidental discharges. Pepper spray is also routinely used when a juvenile refuses to leave his cell. Probation’s “room extraction” policies dictate staff may fog the room with pepper spray, wait a few minutes, then enter and handcuff a ward.

The county’s policies acknowledge that pepper spray can be especially dangerous when used on certain individuals, such as youth who suffer from asthma or are taking psychotropic medication. Probation confirms to CityBeat that OC spray has been used on some “OC Sensitive” wards, but “medical staff noted no lasting adverse effects.”

Don Cipriani, a guest teacher who worked in San Diego’s juvenile facilities in 2009, describes a “culture of maintaining control,” in which he saw staff use the threat of pepper spray regularly to regulate day-to-day obedience, from preventing fights to enforcing how close a ward could stand to another. Juveniles were conditioned to hit the deck when they heard a guard call out “OC.”

Cipriani, now a senior program officer who works on school-discipline issues for Public Interest Projects, a New York-based nonprofit, notes that pepper spray had a direct impact on education. Classes were regularly cancelled due to OC incidents, and education staff would often return to the teachers’ lounge coughing and with irritated eyes because they had been too close to a spraying.

Editorial: Houston juvvie justice puts LA to shame: Ridley-Thomas

April 28, 2012: From City Watch LA, written by Mark Ridley-Thomas, at left, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. This piece first appeared in Zocalo Public Square.

VOICES FROM PUBLIC SQUARE - Several weeks ago, I was a spectator in a remarkable classroom. An instructor from India was teaching a group of African-American, Latino, and white high school students about religion in South Asia and showing them pictures of Krishna, Vishnu, and Ganesha on a multimedia “smart board” she controlled with a laptop computer. 
As a former teacher and a career civil rights advocate interested in improving education for minority youths, I found the scene heartwarming. But the visit was also heartbreaking. 

The class was taking place in a juvenile detention facility in Houston. Of course, seeing young men incarcerated is always tragic. But what hurt most was realizing that this everyday ritual in Texas—in which students gathered in an innovative, engaging class in a youth probation camp—was something I’d rarely see in Los Angeles. 

Senate Public Safety Comm votes on juvvie detention isolation today

Juveniles in Solitary in CA Senate today-tcr

April 24, 2012:  The amount of time that juveniles can spend in isolation/solitary in state and county detention facilities will be limited if the proposed legislation SB 1363, passes the California Legislature. Michael Montgomery reported on the issue on this morning's California Report (KQED public radio, above). The Senate Public Safety Committee will vote on the legislation today in Sacramento. 

"We do not have solitary confinement, it simply does not exist. The only time we have used it in any time in a restrictive setting is for [the juveniles'] own safety [or the safety of others around them]," Bill Cessa of the California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation told Montgomery.

Excerpted from the revised legislation [an exact copy; all colors, emphases, etc. are in the original]:

This bill would provide that a minor or ward who is detained in, or sentenced to, any juvenile facility, jail, or other secure state or local facility shall not be subject to solitary confinement, as defined, unless the minor or ward poses an immediate and substantial risk of harm to others or to the security of the facility, and all other less-restrictive options have been exhausted. The bill would permit the minor or ward to be held in solitary confinement only in accordance with specified guidelines, including that the minor or ward be held in solitary confinement only for the minimum time required to address the safety risk, but only if and that does not compromise the mental and physical health of the minor or ward is not compromised. The bill would require clinical staff to evaluate a minor or ward, and to issue a written directive that the minor or ward shall not be placed in solitary confinement if specified determinations are made. The bill would require these evaluations to be incorporated into the initial intake assessment made by clinical staff before a minor or ward is detained or committed to placement, and to be reviewed during regularly scheduled mental health appointments, assessments, or evaluations with clinical staff. The bill would require clinical staff to evaluate a minor or ward in solitary confinement daily to determine whether the minor or ward shall remain in solitary confinement face to face within one hour after placement, and every 4 hours thereafter, as specified. The bill would require treatment staff to implement an individualized suicide crisis intervention plan, as specified, before subjecting a minor or ward who has exhibited suicidal behavior or committed acts of self-harm to solitary confinement. By increasing the duties of local juvenile facilities, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program.