History of California Juvenile Correction

The History of California Juvenile Correction
Name
Institution
The History of California Juvenile Correction
Headquartered in Sacramento, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), under which the juvenile justice system falls, oversees prison operations and the state’s parole systems. CDCR is the second largest police agency in the U.S. after New York City Police Department.
History
The state of California commissioned its first state-run institution in 1851, which was a 268-ton wooden ship named “The Waban” moored in San Francisco Bay. The prison ship initially housed thirty inmates, who provided labor to build the San Quentin State Prison.
The first statewide youth correction facilities in California, known as California Youth Authority (CYA) were created in 1941. The CYA provided the mechanism for processing the youth and minors through the justice system. In its early years, the YCA focused on keeping juvenile offenders close to their home communities. During its first 30 years, the total inmate population never went above 7, 000. As a result of increasing rates of crime among the youth in the late 1970 and early 1980s, however, the state passed punitive measures that led to the incarceration of many youths (Krisberg, et al., 2010). By 1996, the population of youth inmates in California’s juvenile correctional facilities had grown to over 10, 000. The sharp increase was attributed to cost saving measures which encouraged sending more youths to CYA instead of county homes or county facilities, declining state funding of local programs in the counties, and fear in the general public that the California youth was becoming increasingly dangerous.
Reports of Abuse
In 2003, the Prison Law Office raised concerns that the policies and practices in the California Youth Authority (which by then had been renamed the Division of Juvenile Facilities, or DJF) were encouraging abuse of inmates (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 2014). The charges included neglect and abuse of youth in custody by the officers, and harsh conditions for the inmates. These were accompanied with media highlights of the conditions under which incarcerated inmates lived, leading to major public hearings to address these issues.
In 2004, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed a Corrections and Independent Review Panel led by former Governor George Deukmejian to look into these allegations. Among other findings, the commission reported that there high rates of recidivism (rehabilitated youth returning to crime) that exceeded any other state, over-expenditure, abuse of inmates by the correctional officers, the correctional facilities’ failure to provide inmates with proper health care, shelter, and other basic services, as well as increasing cases of indiscipline in the system as a result of which wrong-doing employees went unpunished.
Senate Bill 81
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