Eighty years after California created separate incarceration facilities to spare teenagers from being locked up alongside adults, the state has pledged to begin the shutdown of its long-troubled and frequently violent youth prisons.
The planned dismantling of the Division of Juvenile Justice, or DJJ, comes after years of scandal and mistreatment of young offenders, which spurred multiple reform efforts and more than a decade of state court oversight that ended in 2016. The shutdown mirrors changes across the country — embracing rehabilitation over punishment and confinement close to home, rather than in isolated state facilities.
Three remaining DJJ prisons will stop taking new prisoners in July, with rare exceptions. California plans to close the facilities — twin lockups in Stockton and another in Ventura — in July 2023, under a state law passed last year and a budget directive issued in January by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Longtime critics of the youth prisons called the pending closure “a transformational event,” coming just two decades after California voters passed Proposition 21, intended to get tough on young offenders by sending many to adult prisons.
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