Defense attorneys and social workers say excessively long wait times at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall are hindering their clients’ access to legal services and potentially violating their constitutional rights.
The waits to see a client can stretch as long as three hours at times, forcing attorneys to decide between scheduling their entire day around the visit or leaving without seeing their client, according to Roshell Amezcua, director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Loyola Law School.
“Everybody knows that this is the new normal; if you get there past 8:30 a.m., then you’re waiting,” Amezcua said. “If you’re not the very first person, then you’re waiting two to three hours.”
Those delays could be considered unconstitutional. Amezcua pointed to a U.S. Court of Appeals case, Benjamin v. Fraser, in which a judge determined that wait times longer than 45 minutes for attorneys visiting clients at Rikers Island in New York “led to unconstitutional burdens to inmate access to counsel and courts.”
Other attorneys have echoed the complaints about long waits as well. The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office hosted a seminar for practitioners representing juveniles in late April. One of the common themes brought up at the meeting was how difficult it is to gain access to clients, said Justine Esack, chief deputy for the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office.
“We know that our attorneys and our social workers sometimes spend hours waiting for access to their clients,” Esack said. “Those are hours lost from our ability to do other work for them, to attend to our other clients’ cases. That should never be the case.”
‘A noticeable improvement’
In a statement, the Probation Department denied the problem is widespread, indicating that only a small percentage of attorneys who visited in April experienced wait times longer than 20 minutes.
“The L.A. County Probation Department understands how crucial it is for youth in our care to meet with their legal representatives,” the statement reads. “The staff at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall works diligently to minimize wait times and the Department recently added four additional booths in the chapel to accommodate attorney-client conferences — a move that has led to a noticeable improvement.”
The department analyzed a visitor log that showed 90% of the 112 attorney-related visits to Downey juvenile hall were “within 20 minutes of when the attorney signed in and made the interview request.” The other 10% — or 11 visits — had wait times of 20 to 70 minutes “because youth were unavailable, i.e. in the classroom, engaged in some other programming, or out of the facility for a court appearance, or a medical appointment, etc.”
Occasional delays “may occur due to operational factors, daily scheduling and logistical issues,” according to the department.
Anecdotal evidence of delays
The department’s analysis wasn’t consistent with the experiences of Amezcua and the staff in her office. She estimated she personally visited Los Padrinos four times in April and every visit took longer than 20 minutes, with at least three of the visits exceeding the department’s top end of 70 minutes. A social worker from the Juvenile Justice Clinic visits every week and had similar experiences, she said.
She found it difficult to imagine that her office alone accounted for more than half of the 11 visits with wait times longer than 20 minutes. “Based off my own experience, I know I have waited longer than three hours,” she said.
Another attorney waiting during a recent visit said he’d left without seeing his client three times due to the waits, Amezcua said. Students from the clinic are told to clear their schedules before such visits, she said.
Juvenile defense attorneys can face an uphill battle when trying to build trust and rapport with their clients, some of whom have mental health disorders and learning disabilities. If an attorney tells a youth they will visit and then doesn’t show up because they couldn’t get past the waiting room, the youth often doesn’t know why, she said.
One of the clinic’s clients is a 17-year-old with a learning disability whose competency is in question by the courts. He requires longer meetings to help him understand how his case is progressing, she said.
“For him, in particular, it is really hard to build trust, it is really hard for him to talk to us at all,” Amezcua said. “We have to meet with him over and over again, and we’re not able to do so as often as we need to because there is a long wait time.”
Complaints about long wait times have come up repeatedly over the past year. Similar concerns were brought to the attention of Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa and then-Los Padrinos Superintendent Albert Banuelos during Los Angeles County Probation Oversight Commission meetings in September and November, respectively.
Amezcua raised the issue during the commission’s May 9 meeting. Kimberly Epps, chief deputy of juvenile operations for the Probation Department, stated in response that such complaints had not “been elevated to the proper place for review” and recommended contacting the department’s ombudsman with a formal complaint.
Chronic staffing issues
The Probation Department has struggled with staffing for years and, as a result, routinely could not get youths in its juvenile halls to school and other programming on time. The number of probation officers dwindled so much last year that state regulators at the Board of State and Community Corrections threatened to shut down Los Padrinos if conditions did not improve.
The Los Angeles County Public Defenders Union expressed its own concerns about wait times in a letter to the BSCC ahead of a Feb. 15 meeting where the future of Los Padrinos was in question. The union stated “staffing conditions have reached a breaking point, creating a dangerous and inhumane culture at the juvenile detention facilities.” Youth experienced violence, some of which was encouraged by staff, and uninhabitable conditions, including freezing temperatures at night, the letter states.
The long waits to see clients actively hindered cases at the time.
“The wait times for doctors and other experts to interview our clients grew so long that many experts refuse to evaluate our clients at Los Padrinos,” the union’s leadership wrote.
The Probation Department took a drastic step the following month and controversially redeployed more than 200 field officers to the juvenile halls. The influx of officers allowed the department to meet the minimum staffing ratios required to avoid a shutdown.
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Sean Garcia-Leys, a probation oversight commissioner and co-executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center, has repeatedly heard complaints about wait times from public defenders and alternate public defenders. He cautioned that while Los Padrinos received additional reinforcements in March, the new arrivals effectively reached the “bare minimum” staffing required by law.
“Despite the 250 staff that have been transferred or reassigned, you still have a situation where there are no available staff who are physically able to escort youth back and forth across the campus,” he said.
Amezcua said she noticed sharp improvements in wait times in February while the BSCC’s threat of a shutdown loomed over the department. However, she said, the delays began to increase again after the BSCC voted in early April to allow Los Padrinos to stay open.
“I don’t know what they’re prioritizing or not,” she said, “but certainly access to counsel does not feel like a priority when we’re waiting that long.”
