Features

A First Look at Alameda County’s New Juvenile Hall

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday February 09, 2007

Following a breakfast gathering in which local law enforcement officials painted a bleak picture of youth crime in Alameda County, representatives of Alameda County’s black elected officials and black clergy took one of the first public tours the other week of the county’s soon-to-be-opened Juvenile Justice Center. 

Some 75 ministers, city councilmembers, and County Supervisors walked the two-story dormitory tiers, lay down on rubber mattresses in tiny cells, and viewed spacious classrooms, a vast gymnasium, and a grassy exercise yard with spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and the coastal hills beyond. 

The meeting and tour was sponsored by the Black Elected Officials and Faith Based Leaders of the East Bay organization, currently chaired by Alameda County Supervisors President Keith Carson. The organization represents officials and faith-based leaders in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. 

Other local elected officials attending the meeting and tour were Berkeley City Councilmember Max Anderson, Oakland City Councilmembers Larry Reid and Desley Brooks, Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, Richmond City Councilmember Tony Thurmond, Oakland School Board member Greg Hodge, Alameda County School Board member Gay Plair Cobb, and a representative of State Senator Don Perata’s Violence Task Force. 

Carson’s chief of staff, Rodney Brooks, said one of the purposes of the meeting and tour was to encourage individuals in both the political, economic, and faith-based communities to provide volunteer counseling and other help at the Juvenile Justice Center. Officials from the center as well as several youth organizations said with the limited budget provided, it was impossible for the county to provide adequate education and other services to youth incarcerated at the facility. 

Sometime this spring, county juvenile law enforcement officials expect to bus some 200 to 240 youth offenders to the new facility on San Leandro’s Fairmount Drive, just up the hill from where they are currently living at the present Juvenile Hall. But last week, the new Juvenile Justice Center was eerily quiet, the only sound coming from an army of construction workers doing finishing touches on the facility, and the sound of visitors’ footsteps echoing along the polished floors of the empty hallways. 

“It looks like a prison,” one visitor told one of the corrections officers conducting the tour. 

“Any time you have to house offenders in a controlled environment, it’s going to have elements of containment and observation,” the officer replied, pointing out that each individual section of the facility, from dormitories to recreation rooms, is designed so that every space in the room can be observed by officers from a central location. In the center of the building, officers and construction workers in a darkened monitoring room watched all sections of the facility on television monitors connected to security cameras. 

While the new justice center was built for a capacity of 360, with a handful of the dormitory rooms set up with two beds, Alameda County Probation Department Chief Don Blevins said he does not expect the actual population to exceed 250. 

Earlier, however, Berkeley Police Chief Doug Hambleton and Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker and Berkeley Police Chief cited grim statistics on youth crime and violence in the two cities that showed there does not seem to be a letup in youth candidates for the juvenile facility. 

Hambleton said that Berkeley has one of the highest crime rates in the state, a situation he called “troubling.” He said that while property crimes in Berkeley are “down significantly, some 15 percent, we really don’t know why, though we’re glad about it,” the “trend is up in the violent crime rate” over the past year. 

Hambleton said that with 43 percent of the adults arrested in Berkeley and 42 percent of the juveniles non-Berkeley residents, there was a need for cooperation between East Bay cities to provide a regional solution to the problems of violent crime. 

Tucker, whose city saw a jump to 148 homicides last year, said that “the homicide rate is not the best measure of how serious the violence is in Oakland.” He said that the best measure was violent crime-rape, armed robbery, and aggravated assault-all of which were up in the last year (25 percent increase in aggravated assault, 8.3 percent increase in rape, and 28.8 percent increase in armed robbery). “Without modern medicine,” the chief added, “we’d probably have two to three times the homicides we had last year.” 

Tucker said the solution to Oakland’s crime problem lies in community-police cooperation. 

“We’re never going to enforce ourselves into a safe city,” he said. “We recognize that. We acknowledge that. Historically, the police department has concentrated on the enforcement aspect of crime reduction. Now we want to move more in the area of intervention and prevention.”