Juvenile hall workers need to get to work in Los Padrinos

No one would ever think of any juvenile hall in the nation as an easy place to work. (Or, for that matter, if you were a wayward kid, to be incarcerated.)

Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, run by Los Angeles County in Downey, has been a particularly tough place for law enforcement employees to work in, and for teens who run afoul of the law to live in. The facility, housing about 257 boys, is perpetually on the edge of receivership by the state. As Staff Writer Jason Henry reports, although the county agreed to a settlement that would fix some safety and staffing issues after Sacramento intervened, it is still out of compliance with 206 of the 259 requirements. Nothing describes the ongoing disaster better than what Henry reports: “As examples of the county’s continued failure, Attorney General Rob Bonta has pointed to the indictment of 30 probation officers earlier this year for allowing, and even encouraging, 69 fights at Los Padrinos over a six-month period in 2023 and to a series of drug overdoses over the past two years, including a fatal overdose.”

You want to punish any entity that could allow such crimes. At the same time, you have to be objective — would the state really do any better? Is receivership actually the solution? Because imagine running an organization with these personnel problems: About 61% of the Probation Department staff assigned to the juvenile hall are now on leave or have work restrictions due to injury or other ailments, and 37% of budgeted positions remain vacant. More than 800 people are supposed to be working there; only 205 staffers are actually there full-time.

Angeleno taxpayers don’t care who runs the facility — we just want a safe place for incarcerated youth. But we hear Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa when he says union contracts and civil service protections let too many employees literally not show up for work yet keep their paychecks in the bargain. Probation has taken “hundreds and hundreds of disciplinary actions” against employees taking advantage of the system and “barely made a dent” because of cushy contract protections. Rosa wants to “slash through staffing and regulatory knots” rather than pretend a state takeover is the only answer.

We just want to see Los Padrinos fixed. It can’t be so long as hundreds of employees are allowed to not show up for work.