Game-changer for a probation camp

The Malibu probation camp, one of the few to offer CIF sports, is getting a makeover. Photo/L.A. Daily News

Camp Vernon J. Kilpatrick has been rehabilitating troubled teens for generations. Now the famed Los Angeles County probation camp will be getting a rehab of its own.

This week, after nearly a year of analysis and study, the 50-year-old Malibu facility was chosen as the site of a $41 million makeover aimed at making the probation camp system less prison-like and more therapeutic. Underwritten by a $28 million state grant, the project will demolish the aging, 125-bed camp and replace its run-down infrastructure with a state-of-the-art rehabilitative compound.

“This is a real win for the kids who will go to that camp,” says Assistant Chief Probation Officer Cal Remington. “The architecture really does make a difference, and we’re hoping this will become a prototype.”

Camp Kilpatrick’s two residential dormitories will be split into four smaller cottages that will accommodate up to 120 boys, aged 15 to 18. Office and treatment spaces will accommodate counseling and small group meetings, and classrooms and medical facilities will be more intimate and safer.  Parking, utilities and security will be updated. Even Kilpatrick’s frayed recreational facilities will be improved—it is one of the few camps in which teens have CIF sports as an incentive for good behavior, and a recreational multipurpose field is included in the grant plans. (This Los Angeles Daily News slide show took a look at the camp’s football team in 2006.)

Research has shown that small group settings are most effective in helping turn around the behavior of incarcerated adolescents, says Remington, but most of the county’s probation camps are built around big, institutional barracks and classrooms that subvert, rather than encourage, introspection and change.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 Tuesday to replace Camp Kilpatrick, with Supervisor Gloria Molina casting the only “no” vote. The board’s action is the latest move in a longstanding plan to bring the county’s 17 probation camps into the modern era. The camp system houses some 1,300 young offenders, mostly in environments that feel, in many cases, like army outposts.

“All these camps are so old,” says Remington. “And they were all pretty much built according to the thinking of the early 1950s and 1960s, which was a military barracks-type scheme. And that architecture just does not work. When you put 105, 110 kids with school and gang issues into one of these big dorms, it’s just a recipe for more problems.  There’s more competition, factions get created, you have gang problems. There’s just something about human nature that people get along better in smaller groups.”

Moreover, Remington says, the system’s operating costs have been soaring as the camps’ infrastructure has degenerated. An analysis by the county Chief Executive’s Office found that Camp Kilpatrick needs some $22.3 million worth of renovations beyond the $1.127 million the county spends, on average, to maintain it annually. Necessary repairs range from the camp’s faltering emergency response system to its gym, which has been yellow-tagged since the Northridge earthquake, and are so extensive that county officials determined it would be cheaper to simply tear it down and replace it.

“The camps are all old,” Remington says. “We just chose Kilpatrick because it was the biggest money pit.”

The state grant—authorized by the 2007 Juvenile Justice Reform Bill, which shiftedCalifornia’s non-violent juvenile offenders into county programs— will pay 75% of the cost of the remodel, with the county anteing up $12.4 million in matching funds.  Remington says the department is aiming to have the new camp completed and opened by 2016.

The new design will allow camp supervisors to assign youths to cottages according to their various treatment needs and risk levels, and will create classrooms and treatment areas in which the camps’ charges can focus more easily.

During construction, however, the 100 or so adolescents now being housed at the camp will have to be relocated, and the supervisors instructed probation officials to report back in 90 days with a comprehensive plan. Remington says they will probably be moved in the short term to another camp in the system—one that probation officials hope will have room to continue the sports program.

Posted 2/14/12