Juvenile Justice Oversight Is Shrinking in California, and Advocates Are Alarmed

What happened

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on October 18 that oversight of juvenile justice is shrinking across California, and that advocates are alarmed. The paper’s headline says advocates called the trend “disturbing” and “disappointing.” The Union-Tribune’s full report names the oversight bodies and counties involved. It also carries the responses from officials.

The story comes out of a system that changed shape three years ago. California closed its state youth prisons in 2023 and handed counties full responsibility for young people in the justice system, as the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice has documented and as NPR reported when the closure was first planned in 2020. The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, an advocacy group, has described an urgent lack of services and safety in many of the state’s 88 juvenile facilities. That count covers juvenile halls along with the camps and ranches where counties hold young people.

Other outlets have followed the strain on that county system. The Marshall Project reported in February on a staffing crisis in juvenile facilities in California and New York. A 2025 CalMatters commentary argued that state law lets the state’s oversight panel inspect juvenile facilities and find them “unsuitable,” but gives it no power to enforce that finding. County probation leaders see a different pressure: the Chief Probation Officers of California told The Imprint this month that two newly signed state laws, plus a budget without funding for youth with the most serious cases, would make what it called a “juvenile justice crisis” worse.

Our reflection

Closing the state youth prisons was supposed to bring California’s young people closer to home. Closer should mean easier to see. The Union-Tribune’s reporting points the other way: the young people are nearer, and fewer outside eyes are on them.

The first person to pay is a teenager behind a locked door. He has no way to let anyone outside know what his week was like unless someone from outside comes and asks. Commissioners, inspectors, chaplains and volunteers are the people who ask. When fewer of them come, he carries more of it alone. So do the staff trying to do right in a building that is short on hands.

I want to be honest about why outside eyes matter. Jesus said people love the darkness and stay away from the light when they do not want their deeds exposed (John 3:19 to 20). That is a description of the human heart, and mine is included. Every one of us does worse work when we know no one will ever check. Oversight is a mercy to the people being watched and to the people doing the watching.

Then there is the passage that should keep every church up at night. In Matthew 25 the King says, “I was in prison and you came to me.” Read it slowly. The test he names is whether they came. And the people he sends away are stunned, because they never saw him there. They were not cruel. They were absent, and they never knew who they were missing. For most of us, that is the sin here: distance, and a comfortable numbness that lets a locked building in our own county stay a rumor.

Distance was easier to excuse when these young people were sent to state facilities far from home. Now they are in county halls and camps, some of them a short drive from our sanctuaries. Oversight does not have to wait on Sacramento. Find out whether your county has a juvenile justice commission, when it meets, whether it takes public comment and whether any seats are open. Ask your probation department what it takes to get cleared to come inside, whether you want to mentor a young person or lead a chapel service. In the detention centers where We The Revolt runs programming, the work looks ordinary: same day, same time, learn names, come back.

At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus did the raising. But he told the neighbors to roll the stone away. When Lazarus walked out still wrapped in grave clothes, Jesus turned to them again: unbind him and let him go. The neighbors still have work to do. I have watched young men the system wrote off come home and lead, and every one of them had somebody who kept showing up.

This week, pick one door and knock on it. The steps below are a place to start.

I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.

Matthew 25:36

Source: San Diego Union-Tribune, “‘Disturbing,’ ‘disappointing’: Juvenile justice oversight is diminishing across California, to advocates’ alarm”