When Katherine Lucero became the inaugural director of California’s newly revamped juvenile justice agency in 2021, she was one of two employees responsible for overseeing more than 3,000 youth in detention up and down the state.
At the time, California had just shuttered its youth prison system, moving hundreds of young adults to county-run facilities. Under Senate Bill 823, California lawmakers vowed to rely on more therapeutic practices for youthful offenders, rejecting a strictly punitive response.
The Office of Youth and Community Restoration (OYCR) was created to lead the effort. Under Lucero’s watch, the office has now grown to a staff of more than 40. It has implemented oversight policies, trained counties on the state’s new approach and dispersed state funding.
Now, she has left her job to return to the bench. Lucero now sits on the Yolo County Superior Court and will hear civil cases.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has selected Elizabeth Siggins, former chief of the operations, as acting director to replace her.
Raised in Davis, California, and the child of farmworkers, Lucero, 64, said ending her career as a public servant surrounded by friends and family drove her decision.
Prior to her time with the Office of Youth and Community Restoration, for more than two decades, Lucero served as a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge. Much of that time was spent in dependency and delinquency courts. She helped develop several specialty courtrooms from her San Jose base, including Girls Court, Zero to Three Dependency Drug Treatment Court and Family Wellness Court, and left as presiding juvenile court judge.
In a video posted by the Superior Court, Lucero described how her experiences growing up and alcoholism in the family helped her identify with parents she saw in court.
As she looks back on her tenure with the state, Lucero said the agency she launched has come a long way, and weathered some mistakes.
“I had to break a lot of eggs, and there were a lot of lessons learned,” she said. “But now OYCR is ready to be in leadership mode in a way we haven’t before.”
In an interview with The Imprint, Lucrero shared her thoughts on urgent youth justice issues in the state, including how some counties lowered incarceration for girls and gender-expansive youth, transitioning young people out of secure facilities and how “educational health” guides rehabilitation.
The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
The OYCR reports a 54% drop in the daily population of girls and gender-expansive youth in juvenile halls over the past eight years, driven by several counties. What are some of the most impactful strategies that counties have deployed?
More professionals and stakeholders have begun to see that incarcerating girls and gender-expansive youth for their own safety is maybe not the best response. In a lot of counties, there’s been a conscious desire to partner with community-based organizations that can really engage with the girls and gender-expansive youth to make sure that when they return to the community, they are resourced.
Some of these organizations, like the Young Women’s Freedom Center, actually hire the girls, and they look at the importance of providing economic support. There’s also a big emphasis on connecting girls and gender-expansive youth to family. That includes family-finding, which maybe hasn’t always been a first priority.
We’re thinking more about alternatives, because we know that just one day in detention does create harm. The question is, how can we prevent detention when it’s not a public safety risk. And if we’re just looking at keeping our girls and gender-expansive youth safe, we need to explore doing that with their own family, in their own communities, with the right support, instead of having that default be, let’s keep them in this carceral setting, which we know does not have good outcomes.
Your office has worked to develop a new plan for young people leaving detention centers for halfway houses, camps and community-based residential programs. Why is this model important?
Under SB 823, it’s been part of our mandate. It’s this concept that a slower reintegration back into community is better than just, say, a pure reentry model. That means slowly allowing the youth to come back into community settings, or even home, with some wraparound services.
I call it a high-support kind of phase, to allow the youth to begin to be back in the community, but with court and probation oversight and a connection to community-based organizations or wrap teams.
Let’s say a judge has given a youth three years. Rather than wait until that three years is over at a secure facility, and then having the youth leave on a reentry plan, it allows for a bit of a phasing. It’s really starting to create more of a continuum of support than kind of a strict start-and-finish to the youth’s experience leaving the youth justice space.
Going back to SB 823, one of the changes for California’s juvenile justice system was transitioning from a more punitive approach to a health-focused system. Are there a couple examples that demonstrate this shift?
The job of a young person who becomes involved in the justice system is as a student. What we’ve infused is this concept that they’re students first. We’ve seen how educational ill health — school pushout, suspensions and expulsions — often drove them into systems. As a judge, I saw that 90% of the time, this was what brought our youth in.
If we can support what I would call the social health of a young person, which is their educational health, we can see it in their behavioral health choices. A youth can decide, “You know what? Smoking pot every day is not so good for my education. So maybe I need to stop doing that.”
We need to make sure that every youth feels that there’s a purpose in their lives, and that whatever that purpose is they selected, they need to finish school. They need to see themselves as a student, and once they do, then they can also access higher education or vocational programming. That includes culinary classes or construction training, whatever it is they want to serve the world. If we can infuse that, that’s well-being, and that’s so different from a correctional lens.
Education has clearly been a priority for you during your time at the office. You’ve focused a lot on literacy, including a pilot project across several counties. Why is that issue in particular something you wanted to work on?
Certainly as a judge I saw so many kids socially promoted, getting their high school diploma, and frankly, they couldn’t read well. I had a judge out of San Diego, Judge Ana España, a good friend of mine, contact us early on and say, “My kids can’t read. Help!”
Since I remembered that truth from my days as a sitting judge, I asked Dr. Michael Massa — who’s the head of our health policy division and a very strong champion of educational health — to meet with Judge España and figure out a solution. And he did.
He brought in a community-based organization that teaches kids how to advance reading levels within 30 days. And it was so successful that we’ve been in nine or 10 counties now. This is a public dollar well spent, because it’s not high cost, and we know that if youth can’t read when they leave incarceration, they’re probably going to come back in.
Jeremy Loudenback is a senior reporter for The Imprint. The Imprint is a partner of The Intersection and CVJC. Contact him at jloud@imprintnews.org.