Remembering California’s History in Youth Corrections

California is preparing to close the last of its state-run youth prisons, and the decision draws a line under more than a century of institutional confinement of children. The Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) — for most of its life known as the California Youth Authority — traces its lineage to nineteenth-century reform schools built on the conviction that wayward youth could be corrected through routine and punishment. Senate Bill 823, signed in September 2020, ends that experiment by shifting responsibility for committed youth to the counties. To understand why the Legislature reached for so drastic a remedy, it helps to look back at how the system was built, how it failed, and how courts and lawmakers tried for two decades to repair it before concluding that it could not be saved.

From reform school to youth authority

The state’s juvenile institutions predate the modern correctional bureaucracy by generations. After San Francisco opened an industrial school in 1859, the Legislature in 1890 authorized two state reform schools; the Whittier State School admitted its first children in 1891 and the Preston School of Industry near Ione opened in 1892. These institutions were modeled on adult penitentiaries, with regimented labor and discipline standing in for what later generations would call treatment.

The framework that governed the system for most of the twentieth century arrived in 1941, when the Legislature adopted the Youth Corrections Authority Act and created what became the California Youth Authority (CYA). The CYA absorbed the older reform schools and grew into a sprawling network of training schools and camps. In 2005 a reorganization folded the agency into the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and renamed it the Division of Juvenile Justice — a change of letterhead that did little to alter conditions inside.

The Farrell litigation and the consent decree

The legal turning point came in 2003, when the Prison Law Office filed a taxpayer suit, Farrell v. Allen (later captioned Farrell v. Cate and Farrell v. Kernan as directors changed), in Alameda County Superior Court. The complaint alleged that the CYA was spending public funds on practices that violated state law: youth held in isolation, denied adequate education, and deprived of meaningful mental health, medical, and dental care. Rather than litigate the allegations to judgment, the parties entered a consent decree in November 2004 under which the agency agreed to develop and implement detailed remedial plans across areas including safety and welfare, mental health, education, sex-behavior treatment, health care, and the treatment of youth with disabilities.

The decree placed the system under court-supervised reform for more than a decade. Independent experts monitored compliance, and the litigation became the engine behind a series of structural changes the agency had resisted on its own. The court did not terminate its oversight until 2016, when it found that the state had substantially complied with the remedial plans.

Reform, retrenchment, and a shrinking population

While the Farrell remedies worked through the courts, a parallel policy shift hollowed out the state system from the other direction. A 2007 realignment redirected lower-level offenders to county supervision, and the population in state youth facilities fell dramatically over the following decade — from thousands of youth to only a few hundred by the time closure was on the table. The remaining population skewed toward older youth committed for serious offenses, and a system originally built for tens of thousands now operated a handful of large, costly institutions for a fraction of that number.

The Legislature also narrowed some of the practices that had drawn the Farrell complaint. In 2018, lawmakers sharply restricted the use of solitary confinement for youth in state and county facilities, codifying limits that advocates had sought for years. These measures improved conditions at the margins, but they did not resolve the deeper question of whether a centralized state system was the right place to confine children at all.

SB 823 and the move to county responsibility

Senate Bill 823, enacted in 2020, marks the formal end of the state’s role. The statute closed DJJ intake for most youth as of July 1, 2021, leaving counties responsible for housing, programming, and treatment of young people who can no longer be committed to the state. To oversee the transition, the bill created the Office of Youth and Community Restoration within the California Health and Human Services Agency, deliberately situating juvenile oversight outside the adult corrections department for the first time in a generation. Follow-on legislation set a firm date — June 30, 2023 — for the remaining facilities to cease juvenile operations.

The realignment reflects a theory that youth do better closer to home, in smaller settings connected to family and community services, than in remote state institutions. It also transfers significant discretion and cost to counties of widely varying capacity, which is where the hardest questions now live. The Legislature has wrestled with similar trade-offs in other contexts, including the labor protections extended to incarcerated people who fight the state’s wildfires, where confinement and public service intersect in uncomfortable ways.

What the closure leaves unresolved

Ending the state system does not, by itself, guarantee better outcomes. Counties must build secure-track placements for youth who would once have gone to DJJ, and they must do so under the same constitutional and statutory floors — adequate care, education, and protection from abuse — that the Farrell decree spent a decade enforcing. Whether the new Office of Youth and Community Restoration can hold sixty-odd counties to a consistent standard, without the leverage of a single consent decree, is an open question. Oversight that was once concentrated in one courtroom is now diffused across local juvenile systems and a new state office still defining its authority.

The history is worth remembering precisely because the failures were not secret. They were documented in expert reports, litigated for years, and acknowledged in legislation. As California devolves its youth-justice obligations to the counties, the record of how a punitive, century-old system resisted reform until it was dismantled is the most useful map the state has for not rebuilding the same institution under a different name. Further coverage appears in the journal’s commentary and case tracker.

This publication offers commentary and analysis, not legal advice.