Welcome to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Offenders

Division of Juvenile Justice Offenders

Six Important Areas

Prevention and Early Intervention Advocacy

While state government's role and capabilities in primary (children in general) and secondary (at risk children) prevention activities are rather limited, I do believe that we have a role as advocates and supporters of local prevention programs, activities and efforts, and will gladly use my office as a "bully pulpit" for such efforts.

I also believe that there are some areas where we may be able to provide technical assistance, research or act as an information clearinghouse. Finally, there is a more direct and obvious role for the Youth Authority in tertiary (offender) prevention efforts. We will continue to try new approaches and ideas and, whenever feasible, include strong research components to measure outcomes.

Transitioning Offenders to the Community

This is an area that requires a significant increase in attention and focus. We may very well be the country's experts on "negative" information. By that, I mean that I can readily obtain information on a relatively routine basis on such things as, how many parolees were revoked last month, how many parolees were arrested, how many had dirty drug tests, etc.

On the other hand, I am unable to determine how many parolees got jobs this month, how many were enrolled in school, and how many are continuing to receive treatment in the community. This is despite the fact that we know that if these young people get jobs and keep them or continue their education and continue to appropriately deal with their addictions or deficits, their chances for success improve dramatically.

This is not to say that these things are not occurring. But clearly we need to give these factors greater weight when evaluating our performances.

We also need to redefine our goal in transitioning offenders to the community to one that attempts to emancipate these young people from their previous circumstances. Most of our youthful offenders leave as young adults. Family reunification is, more often than not, neither feasible or desirable. Our goal ought to be to get these offenders capable of standing on their own two feet and starting new lives away from their former environments and temptations.

The Handling of Violent Offenders

Nowhere in this country, and perhaps nowhere in this world, is there a greater number or a greater concentration of youthful violent offenders than we have in the Youth Authority. We are, or should be, the "laboratory" for testing various strategies and approaches to dealing with young violent offenders. While I believe we may be getting some incredible results from both individual and team efforts employing techniques like anger management classes and "187 groups," we have only scratched the surface in these attempts.

Sometime during the next 12 to 18 months, I intend to call for a Director's Summit on Violent Offenders. Using a transfer of knowledge workshop format, my goal will be to bring together internal and external expertise to share knowledge about promising approaches, develop a specific action plan for implementing statewide strategies, and determine appropriate means for evaluating our efforts. The rest of the nation looks to and depends on our leadership.

Restorative Justice

The concept of restorative justice recognizes public safety as the goal of our system. But to achieve this goal, we must reposition the juvenile justice system in general and the Youth Authority in particular to give consideration to achieving three objectives:

-To restore the victim to the extent feasible,
-To restore and protect the community, and
-To develop offender competencies so offenders can make it in the "real world."

We are recognized as a national leader in victim services, but there is still considerable work to do. Increasing victim restitution collections is but one example.

I believe that we can best contribute to restoring the community through our public service activities. In this regard, it is my goal that within two years, we will require that every ward and parolee will perform some type of public service before they are released from our jurisdiction.

Developing offender competencies or living skills will require that we provide appropriate training for our youth counselors and close coordination between living unit and correctional education staff.

Public Safety

We will continue to be the national leaders in public safety. We will do so by further refining and standardizing our security practices and procedures and by taking advantage of emerging technologies. While our record is far from perfect, we can still be proud of the extremely low numbers of escapes and serious incidents, particularly in consideration of the 16,000 serious and violent offenders who are under our custody or parole supervision. Staff safety is also a priority. Consistent with this priority, I believe it is also important that we introduce the latest techniques and strategies to create an environment that prevents workplace violence.

Correctional Education

We have made great strides in recent years to improve our correctional education programs. I will continue to make our correctional "school district" a top priority in my administration. Effective May, 1996 - the Superintendent of Education was elevated to Deputy Director status and Education Services was recognized as a branch of the department. When the public thinks of the Youth Authority, I want them to think about our schools and character-based correctional education as perhaps our best opportunities to change offenders who choose to take advantage of the services we offer them. We will rigorously evaluate results and strive to increase the number of GED, high school and college graduates in our efforts to "correct" young offenders.