LAST MONTH MARKED the anniversary of my son's death while in a facility run by the California Youth Authority, the state's youth corrections agency. On Jan. 19, 2004, he and his roommate, Deon Whitfield, were found dead in their cell, hanged, their young lives cut short. The headline read "suicide," but I know California's failed juvenile justice system killed my son.

The two deaths showed the world that California's youth prisons are a national disgrace. It's way past time to get our young people of out abusive and wasteful prisons and into real rehabilitation. We must close the CYA youth prisons that dehumanized my son – and continue to dehumanize thousands of other young people. We can build a new way of taking care of our youths in trouble.

There's no denying that 2004 was a year of scandal for the CYA. Four young men died in CYA prisons last year, and widely publicized reports revealed guards isolating young people in six-foot-by-nine-foot cement cells for months at a time, abusing kids with chemical weapons, and failing to provide even basic levels of educational, medical, and mental health care. A videotaped beating of two youths by CYA guards played all over national news.

This is what the CYA calls rehabilitation? It costs Californians more than $400 million per year. That works out to nearly $80,000 dollars per year, per kid – enough to send them to Harvard twice over.

Meanwhile, not surprisingly, after being brutalized and isolated in CYA facilities, somewhere between 70 and 91 percent of all youths coming out of the CYA get arrested again within three years.

This must be the year of transformation. There is a better way. We must start by closing the giant warehouse youth prisons beginning with "Chad," the N.A. Chaderjian Correctional Facility in Stockton.

These brutal, massive prisons destroy our young people's spirits and chances to become healthy adults. We should replace them with community-based programs and regional rehabilitation centers.

On Monday, just a week after the announcement of sweeping reform legislation sponsored by state senator Gloria Romero, the CYA's new leadership also put out a plan to move the system in that direction. The plan calls for a new model of juvenile justice in California – based on rehabilitation not incarceration. Rod Hickman, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's corrections secretary, had the bravery to tell it like it is: the CYA must be rebuilt from the ground up.

Now is the time to follow through. Sacramento's pro-prison lobby will fight these reforms tooth and nail. They've got a big stake in the incarceration industry, and they'll try to scare the state into backing off from real change. But I know we cannot rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic; the CYA is broken, and tinkering will not help.

Just look at the recent Office of the Inspector General's lengthy "accountability audit" of the CYA, which found that, in the four years since the last audit, little had changed. The CYA still uses 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, still provides almost no education, and still provides abysmal health services.

Just days before the report's release, youths at both the Ventura facility for girls and the Chino boy's facility separately filed suit for sexual assault by CYA staff.

Other states know rehabilitation isn't possible in abusive prisons. Missouri transformed its youth justice system 20 years ago and now has an 8 percent recidivism rate. Louisiana recently closed that state's most notorious youth prison, Tallulah, and mandated the savings go to fund community-based alternatives. Illinois recently passed the "Redeploy Illinois" Initiative to systematically reduce that state's reliance on youth incarceration. If Missouri, Louisiana, and Illinois can do it, so can we.

Allen Feaster is the father of Durrell Feaster, who died in California Youth Authority custody last Jan. 19, and a member of Books Not Bars, the statewide organization fighting to transform California's juvenile justice system.