Sheila Mitchell

On February 5, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a landmark public-private partnership that will get a significant amount of county funding into the hands of community-based organizations focused on keeping kids out of the juvenile justice system by offering an array of much-needed services and opportunities.

Los Angeles County continues to wrestle with the safety and well-being of youth in its juvenile detention facilities after a new report found the Probation Department has too often used pepper spray on youth.

At a recent meeting of the Los Angeles County Probation Commission, tensions about how the county is implementing an alternative to solitary confinement in local juvenile detention centers boiled over during the questioning of a senior member of the Probation Department.

Campus Kilpatrick, the $53 million juvenile detention camp where Los Angeles County is spearheading its reform agenda, is facing scrutiny following a scathing report from a member of the probation department’s independent oversight commission.

As the Los Angeles County Probation Department dismantles a controversial shadow probation program in schools, some county education officials worry that they will be left with fewer resources to work with young people who misbehave at school.

With questions swirling about the use of solitary confinement at Los Angeles County’s Central Juvenile Hall, the Board of Supervisors moved forward on Tuesday with a plan strengthen its oversight of the troubled Probation Department.

A plan released by the Los Angeles County Probation Department this week calls for shuttering six of the county’s juvenile detention camps over the next two years. The proposal would also relocate girls currently housed in the other camps into the eagerly awaited Campus Kilpatrick facility, a move that drew the ire of some commissioners at today’s Los Angeles County Probation Commission meeting.

Los Angeles County has amassed a $36.7 million hoard of unspent money that is earmarked for community-based approaches to preventing at-risk youth from entering the juvenile justice system. Among the unspent dollars is funding for a county-wide diversion program that has yet to serve even one child, and is at the center of a controversy about how Los Angeles County’s Probation Department has failed to allocate money to community organizations that work with at-risk youth.

Since the revelation last year that nearly 3,600 at-risk youth in Los Angeles County were being supervised by Probation Department staff despite having never been charged with a crime, advocates have raised serious concerns about the so-called “voluntary probation” process.