By Tali Woodward

San Francisco's youth population is shrinking, crime is plummeting, and the budget is extraordinarily tight this year. So why is the city government moving to spend $28 million to build a new juvenile detention hall?

The plan to build a new facility with 150 beds – 18 more than the current, decrepit Youth Guidance Center on Woodside Road has – stirred opposition when it was proposed in the late 1990s. But dissent was quelled by arguments that the added beds were needed to secure $15 million in state matching funds.

Now youth activists are again raising questions about spending $28 million in city money to expand a facility that is rarely full today. And newer members of the Board of Supervisors are pushing the Juvenile Probation Department to consider alternatives.

"It's almost stupid to not look into building a smaller hall," Kamel Jacott-Bell of San Francisco's Youth Commission said. Jacott-Bell is working with Youth Making a Change and other groups to push for a smaller hall.

The YGC replacement project is estimated to cost $43 million, with the state pitching in about one-third of the funding. About half of the city's share has already been allocated to the project in the past couple of city budgets, though construction has not yet started.

Meanwhile, the hall population has been declining – in the month of February an average of 96 kids were locked up, and at times the number has been down in the 80s.

Plus, the city has just begun an initiative to reduce detention rates with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has successfully reformed juvenile justice systems in Sacramento, Chicago, and Portland, Ore.

Portland built a new juvenile facility around the time it started the Casey initiative. Today fewer kids are detained, and many of the rooms in the facility go empty.

Still, San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Department continues to push the project. Chief probation officer Jesse Williams said in a faxed statement, "The project will resolve some long-standing facilities problems in Juvenile Hall and offer many benefits and advantages," including more room for education and mental health services.

But Dan Macallair, associate director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, said, "There's virtually no excuse to build a juvenile hall that size."

Building a bigger facility just means that more kids will be arrested, Macallair said. A CJCJ report from last June showed that a kid arrested in San Francisco today is twice as likely to be detained as one arrested a decade ago. By 1999, 85 percent of juvenile arrests in the city led to detention – and most of the kids who are locked up are African American or Latino. Macallair also worries that a larger hall might stymie progress, because a smaller facility "forces the bureaucracy to develop the programs and services [kids] need." Almost a third of all kids in YGC at any given time are eligible for release but are waiting for out-of-home placement.

Sups. Gerardo Sandoval and Matt Gonzalez, both former public defenders, are reopening the debate in the context of this year's budget process. The board's Economic Vitality and Social Policy Committee heard testimony in January from advocates who are asking the city to go back to the drawing board.

"We want the Mayor's Criminal Justice Council to look into the possibility of not accepting the $15 million that we will receive from the state of California if we build a juvenile hall with 150 beds," Youth Commission member Mari said at the hearing, reading from a statement by the commission. "We want MCJC to investigate the feasibility of building this juvenile hall without the state money that demands expansion."

Jacott-Bell later told us that because the Juvenile Probation Department is facing budget cuts this year, it may have to slash staffing at YGC and funding for community programs. "They don't have the resources to take care of the people who are in there now, and they're talking about expansion," he said. "I don't see the logic."

The activists have some unusual bedfellows in their opposition to the current plan: the San Francisco Deputy Probation Officers Association. Association president Rich Perino said the group does not have a problem with the size of the proposed facility but does have many concerns about the way the plan was developed. "I think what's driving it is the promise of the $15 million the state would provide, rather than an interest in developing a comprehensive plan," he said.