Marisa Lagos, KQED. Img - El Dorado County Chief Probation Officer Brian Richart, pictured at the county juvenile hall on June 22, 2022.

(PLACERVILLE, CALIFORNIA) June 30, 2022 — Twenty-one-year-old Reid Butler spent about a year in one of California’s state youth prisons before officials in his home county convinced a court to let him serve his sentence in a county juvenile hall. Known as the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), the state lockups were plagued by violence among youth and abuse by staff, and often meant young people were incarcerated hundreds of miles away from their families for years.

On a weekday this June, Butler was chatting and working in a large room with the other 10 youths serving time in El Dorado County’s juvenile hall. Most of those young people look up to Butler — he’s the oldest young person incarcerated here, and he’s been here the longest.

Compared to DJJ, Butler said this South Lake Tahoe facility “definitely feels very different.”

“Historically speaking, the Division of Juvenile Justice is very … You could call it a cattle house, because it prunes and picks these kids to be in the system for the rest of their lives,” he said. “I think DJJ has tried to do a good job, but it’s very difficult when you’re sending all of your broken parts to the same place. That factory doesn’t have the tools necessary to fix those parts. Those things need to be dealt with on, like, an individual basis.”

By contrast, Butler said, he’s made significant progress here, getting his high school diploma, then earning his associate’s degree through a community college. And, he’s become a model for other young people here.

“It’s very interesting how the kids look up to me … How much respect people have for my advice, of my opinion,” he said. “I’ve learned through my experience that teaching somebody else helps you to learn better … when they succeed, you succeed. When you see people are happy, you’re happy because you’re putting your time and your investments into them. It’s a very nurturing environment to be a leader.”

That’s exactly the culture Brian Richart, chief probation officer for El Dorado County, is looking to create as he — along with the state’s 57 other counties — prepare for the end of state juvenile prisons. […]

Richart said the biggest challenge now is making his outdated, decades-old juvenile hall feel less like a prison and more like a school, home and therapeutic space.

“This facility was opened approximately 19-ish years ago, but in my opinion, it was designed in the older style and the older modality. So when you walk around the facility, you hear the steel doors close, you see the concrete aspects of the facility, the cinder block walls,” he said.

El Dorado County isn’t alone in this — most counties are working with similarly dated facilities. Some are being rebuilt; El Dorado County is making plans to build a new facility in Placerville. But that will take years, so in the meantime, probation departments are making small shifts to make the current buildings more livable and less prison-like. And they’re focusing on what Richart sees as the most important element: staff.

“Yes, facilities matter, but what matters tenfold are the staff. If you see somebody in a certain way, you’ll tend to treat them that way. And if you tend to treat them that way, they will tend to behave that way,” he said, adding that while the facility is a “limiting factor … it is certainly not something that prevents my staff from actually doing the type of family-based work that we’ve been doing for the last decade.”

That means staff here act more like social workers than cops; they build trust with the youth. […]

In El Dorado County, Mario Guerrero was one of the community members on the local committee. He’s a program manager at the nonprofit Child Advocates of El Dorado County and has worked in youth services here in his hometown county for 20 years.

Guerrero said he’s generally supportive of how the probation department is running juvenile justice here. But he worries about whether communities around the state will step up to help, or stand in the way. He noted that in El Dorado County, Chief Richart’s proposal to build a regional facility to house and treat sex offenders from several counties was killed by the local board of supervisors.

Guerrero said in order for young people to actually be rehabilitated, it’s going to take a village.

“For those who might be a little bit skeptical or unaware, we understand those fears,” he said. “But the reality is these kids are really amazing kids. They have a lot of potential in life and they just need a lot more guidance and support to be steered in the right direction. But most of them are really, really gifted and amazing kids that just need a little bit of love to find their way.”

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