By Karen Pank, Executive Director, Chief Probation Officers of California. Originally published in Los Angeles Daily News.

Close the youth prisons first. Invent the replacement later. That was California’s plan.

To understand how we got here, step back. From 2000 to 2019, California’s juvenile justice system made historic gains. With state support during that time, county probation departments cut juvenile arrests by 73 percent and kept more than 90 percent of youth who committed crimes in the community instead of locked facilities….

Then the design changed. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 823, which closed the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), and shifted California’s highest-risk, highest-need youth onto the counties. Probation departments warned that closing DJJ without a focused replacement would fail the young people the state claimed to be helping. The warnings were ignored.

Now, the results are measurable. Forty-six percent of youth committed to the local replacement for DJJ are there for murder or attempted murder. Nearly 80 percent are 17 to 25 years old. Violent felony arrests have risen nearly 60 percent since DJJ closed.

Counties are also under pressure to move young people out of secure treatment too quickly. A private placement market has grown up around this population without the safeguards Californians would demand for any other group of children….

While much needs to be addressed to change the trajectory we are currently on, Probation tried to close one of those gaps this legislative session. Senate Bill 1157, introduced by Sen. Bob Archuleta, would have required better information before placing a young person who is still serving a custodial term in a private congregate home. It would not have built a new statewide bureaucracy. It would not have given more power to the same state office that created the gap. It simply would have given probation the facts needed to advise the court and protect the youth.

The bill received only one no vote in both houses. It died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. California would never accept a residential program for foster youth or patients without standards for safety and oversight, yet it is lowering the bar for those in the juvenile justice system.

California fingerprints the aide who walks a kindergartner to class, yet it will not give probation the same basic information before a 19-year-old convicted of a violent felony is sent to a private congregate home still serving a custodial term. If the bar for a classroom is a background check, the bar for a private lockup cannot be lower. Right now, it is. That is how the state is failing these young people.

SB 1157 was a warning, not the whole problem. County probation departments still stepped forward. Individual young people have succeeded under difficult conditions. Those stories matter. They do not change the larger truth: the system is designed against lasting success….

Young people who have committed serious offenses need time, structure, treatment, accountability and support. The next failure will not be theoretical. It will be a youth placed somewhere unprepared to meet their needs, a family left without answers, and a community asking why obvious safeguards were rejected.

The next governor can choose a different path without abandoning programming or community support. That path starts with four concrete steps: compel the information probation needs to advise judges; require local approval before private congregate homes operate; hold vendors who take public dollars accountable; and stop punishing probation for insisting on safety. The warning has already been sounded. The Chief Probation Officers of California are ready to work with the next governor to build the safeguards California’s youth and communities deserve.

Read the OpEd in Los Angeles Daily News.