New Facility for Juveniles to Open Soon

The Los Angeles County Probation Department will open the largest juvenile detention facility in the county next week, a 660-bed complex in Lancaster that is expected to relieve crowding at the department’s three juvenile halls.

Opening ceremonies for the 42-acre, $35-million Challenger Memorial Youth Center are scheduled for Tuesday. The facility, named for the destroyed Challenger space shuttle, includes six individual camps named after each of the astronauts who died in the 1986 crash. The camp school will be named after Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died with the astronauts.

The camp at Avenue I and 60th Street West replaces the adjacent Mira Loma youth facility, which has a capacity of 122. That land will be returned to the Sheriff’s Department for use by the neighboring adult jail at the county complex in western Lancaster, said Challenger Director Richard Birnbaumer.

The new complex will “have a marked impact on overcrowding in the juvenile halls and a marked impact on the quality of programming for the kids,” Birnbaumer said.

The population of the three juvenile halls is 30% over capacity, officials said, with some of the approximately 2,000 juvenile prisoners forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor.

The Challenger complex will relieve some stress on those halls by taking over their role of “reception center.” All boys in the county who are sentenced to serve time in one of 15 youth camps will be processed and evaluated at Challenger for placement, a process that takes about 6 days, Birnbaumer said. The assessment will improve because juveniles will be calmer and more mentally prepared for testing at Challenger than they are after arrival at the juvenile halls, which is often a “traumatic experience,” he said.

The offenses for which juveniles will serve time at Challenger range from “the lowest misdemeanor up to murder,” Birnbaumer said. “They will not usually be the kid who commits the murder, they’ll be the one who was driving the car,” Birnbaumer said, because the most serious juvenile offenders are usually sentenced to the California Youth Authority.

Two camps will serve as reception centers. Three camps will house boys aged 13 to 15, who will attend school each day. The sixth will house 16- to 18-year-old boys who will alternate between school and work in maintenance around the facility.

Average sentences are expected to be 20 weeks for the younger boys and 30 weeks for the older boys.

Birnbaumer described the complex as “high-tech,” with a sophisticated, closed-circuit TV camera monitoring system and computerized heating and cooling systems. It will be surrounded by an 18-foot wall and employ 260 unarmed probation officers, 85 support workers and 42 teachers.

The camp will also be the first in the county with a high-security unit for juveniles with severe discipline problems, combined with an infirmary staffed by a doctor, dentist and 24-hour nurse, Birnbaumer said.

Juveniles will begin to arrive at the camp about the end of the month. But because of budget constraints, the camp will operate at half capacity for the first several months until county officials decide how much to allocate to the camp for the coming fiscal year, officials said.