Juvenile hall depopulation nearly complete but likely won’t hit goal, says L.A. County probation chief

Los Angeles County’s plan to curtail Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall’s population by shifting youths to other facilities is nearly complete, though officials now acknowledge they likely will not reach the original goal of reducing the population to 175.

Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa testified before a Superior Court judge on Friday, Feb. 6, that he expects the Downey-based juvenile hall will now end up with about 200 detainees once the county finishes asbestos-related renovations at the Dorothy Kirby Center in Commerce that have delayed the final transfers out of Los Padrinos.

The department is confident it can come back into compliance with state law at that population level even with its ongoing staffing struggles, Viera Rosa said.

Judge Miguel Espinoza both praised and criticized the county’s progress at the hearing, at times applauding the collaboration between stakeholders and at other times questioning whether the Board of Supervisors was allocating enough resources.

He found the department had demonstrated a “sufficient effort to effectuate the depopulation plan,” though he noted that “significant improvements” were still necessary.

“The court is attempting to very carefully thread a needle here,” he said.

In 2024, Los Padrinos was ordered to close by state regulators for its failure to maintain suitable conditions under state law, but the county refused to comply. The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office challenged the continued operation almost immediately, arguing that youth should not be sent to a facility that is operating unlawfully.

The county, under the depopulation plan approved by Espinoza in May 2025, initially estimated it could drop Los Padrinos’ total population from about 278 to 175 by August 2025.

As of this week, the facility has about 223 youths left, even after transferring dozens of girls to Campus Kilpatrick in the Santa Monica Mountains and a similar number of boys to Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar.

A higher-than-usual number of juvenile arrests last year offset depopulation efforts, officials said. The next and final phase will shift about two dozen males with developmental disabilities from Los Padrinos to Dorothy Kirby.

So far, the transitions have not gone smoothy.

Both Kilpatrick and Nidorf have failed recent inspections by the Board of State and Community Corrections, the California regulatory agency overseeing jails and juvenile halls. Those facilities could be ordered to close, too, if the deficiencies identified aren’t addressed within the next few months.

“We are here because of LP, but we are starting to see signs that the noncompliance is emerging in other places,” Espinoza said at the hearing.

The juvenile hall portion of Barry J. Nidorf has been out of compliance with state law since May 2023 and the county did not obtain the state’s permission before reopening it last year. The BSCC inspectors, during a comprehensive review in December, determined the county had not addressed many of the issues that led to Nidorf’s unprecedented closure nearly three years ago.

Following the transfers in July and September, Nidorf experienced a surge in violence and pepper spray usage. The facility has also faced repeated criticism — internally and externally — for the lack of activities available for the juveniles.

Espinoza focused a large part of Friday’s hearing on problems arising at Campus Kilpatrick, which now houses all of the girls in the county’s custody. Juvenile court judges relied on the mental health programs available to girls at their previous home in the Dorothy Kirby Center and have expressed concerns to Espinoza that the same level of services are not yet available at Kilpatrick.

Kim Binion, the superintendent for Kilpatrick, said the county offers many programs already, including individual and family therapy, and plans to expand. Many of the officers working at Kilpatrick are veterans with experience in providing treatment, she said.

“It doesn’t feel like a juvenile hall,” she said.

The remoteness of the campus in the Santa Monica Mountains has made it difficult for parents to visit and to pick up girls being released into community detention, according to Luis Rodriguez, the juvenile division chief at the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office.

The county offers ride-hailing vouchers to help with visits, but defense attorneys and parents do not know who to contact to obtain the vouchers, Rodriguez said. At the same time, girls who try to turn themselves over to probation officers at Los Padrinos or other more centrally located facilities are being told they must go 52 miles away to Kilpatrick instead, Rodriguez said.

“We continue to have these problems,” he said.

Espinoza similarly described a case in which a girl was set to be released with an ankle monitor, but her mother, who had taken public transportation to the Inglewood Juvenile Courthouse, was expected to travel to Kilpatrick to pick her up under the current system. The judge ultimately ordered the girl released directly from the courthouse instead.

At the end of the hearing, Espinoza ordered the county to develop a better system for issuing vouchers and for handling community detention releases.

He also ordered the county to report back to him on its efforts to come back into compliance with the BSCC at all of its facilities and, specifically, to provide him with a timeline for when Los Padrinos would be reinspected by the state.

L.A. County has not asked for a reinspection of Los Padrinos as of Friday, according to the BSCC.