Some California counties are paying more than $500,000 per youth to lock up young people

It costs more than $500,000 per youth per year to run California’s juvenile halls in counties such as Alameda, according to a recent report from the Youth Law Center and the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center.

Juvenile hall is a still jail-like experience for many young people despite many efforts to reform the state’s system. Youth crime has dropped significantly over the last few decades in California and across the U.S., the San Francisco Chronicle reports. While some counties are like San Francisco, which closed its juvenile hall and replaced it with community-based programs, other programs can last up to a year in Fresno County and 730 days Tulare County, both in California’s Central Valley.

“What we found is that juvenile hall commitment programs suffer from many of the very things that caused Gov. Newsom to want to shutter the state facility system,” Sue Burrell of the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center told the Chronicle. “The governor’s goal of transforming youth justice as we know it cannot be fulfilled by locking youth in jail-like settings where they cannot exercise judgment, develop skills or engage in healthy peer activities, and where they lack meaningful access to their families and the community.”