Press Coverage

PROGRESS MADE IN YOUTH CRIME REPORT ON LATINOS CITES:  SANTA CRUZ COUNTY AS POSITIVE EXAMPLE By David L. Beck Mercury News

July 30, 2002

In the bad news of a national report that says young Latinos are imprisoned more often and longer than whites, there was good news for Santa Cruz. The county was held up as a rare example of how progress can be made.

But that doesn't mean those concerned can relax, said Latino leaders and others at a discussion of the report held Monday at Barrios Unidos in Santa Cruz. Resources are few. And while it was gratifying to see the disparities spelled out in a national report, they said, that alone won't change anything.

``We see a lot of Latinos going to prison,'' said Daniel Alejandrez, executive director of Barrios Unidos, a youth program aimed at preventing violence. ``There's no program to deal with the emotional and spiritual accounting we need.''

Monday's discussion brought together a small roomful of representatives from some of the non-profit groups working in juvenile justice, seasoned with one activist mother, Marylou Alejo, who said parents need to rethink their own attitudes, and one teenager.

``I want to thank all you guys for having me here,'' said Francisco Garcia, 17. He said he had been ``using a lot'' and was ``in and out of Juvenile Hall.

``If I would've had help, like, the first time, I bet that I would've stayed clean.''

Clean now for five months, Francisco is in Si Se Puede (``yes, we can''), a Watsonville in-patient facility for drug and alcohol rehabilitation where he participates in a ``mentorship'' program in which he is paired with an adult who has been through the same troubles. When he gets out, he'll receive aftercare. He's even playing soccer.

But he was lucky. Si Se Puede, the largest such facility in Santa Cruz County, has only 24 beds -- and only three for young people.

Public defender Jon Minsloff praised the national report for calling attention to ``something that has been apparent to anyone that has been involved in the system.''

The report, ``(sp?)Dónde está la Justicia?,'' was prepared by Building Blocks for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based ``initiative'' whose partners include the Youth Law Center, the American Bar Association Juvenile Justice Center and others.

Its thrust is that Latinos are represented in the juvenile justice system in numbers disproportionate to their status in the general population. It offers an ``index of over-representation'' as a handy way to illustrate those numbers, with 1 being the ideal.

California has an index of about 1.2. Here's how that's figured, according to the study.

The total number of Californians ages 10-17 is 3,708,000. Of those, 39 percent are Latino. But of those youths who are in ``residential placement,'' which includes juvenile halls, California Youth Authority facilities, halfway houses, camps and so on, 46.2 percent are Latino. The larger figure divided by the smaller gives the index.

The authors of the report, Francisco Villarruel and Nancy Walker, both of Michigan State University, discount the idea that different crime rates among ethnic groups contribute significantly to the disparity. Those differences are small, said Walker, by telephone from East Lansing. Nor would they account for the rates of detention ``once they're in the system.''

In Santa Cruz County, the report found, the index is higher than in the state, but progress is being made.

In 1998, Latinos comprised 35.2 percent of the youth population but represented 64 percent of the population of Juvenile Hall -- an index of 1.8. Enlisting the assistance of a variety of community organizations, the probation department and juvenile justice authorities reduced the index to 1.4 in 2001 and just less than 50 percent of the population of Juvenile Hall is Latino.

They did it by referring people for treatment or education and getting parents involved. ``In Santa Cruz,'' said Minsloff, ``there's always been a willingness to opt for treatment rather than incarceration or punishment'' -- what Chief Probation Officer John Rhoads calls ``restorative justice,'' as opposed to retributive justice.

It was Rhoads who enthusiastically brought his agency into a task force created in 1999 to deal with that 64 percent figure, said Raquel Mariscal, director of the Criminal Justice Council of Santa Cruz County, and helped bring it down to its present level.

It takes constant work. In May, the percentage of Latinos in Juvenile Hall was 54 percent; in June, 60 percent; this month, 52 percent.

Officials need to remember that the community-based approach ``is not an encumbrance,'' Mariscal said. ``It's not extra work'' -- just part of the job. ``The criminal justice system needs to constantly re-evaluate itself.''