juvenile hall

Nidorf Juvenile Hall, what can I say? My suspicion about different issues between Clark County and Los Angeles County juvenile offenders was right. Almost all of the kids in Clark County Juvenile Detention were white, and it was my impression that they were mostly there due to drug or drug related offenses (I think a lot had to do with meth). Nidorf Juvenile Hall primarily has Latino and African American kids who I think were mostly in there for gang related things. They make them all walk around with their hands behind their backs and one of the volunteers said she had heard it was so they couldn't flash gang signs to each other. On my volunteer forms it also recommends that you do not wear red or blue to any of the juvenile detention centers or camps (although I don't think my fellow volunteers were following this, but we probably aren't seen as rival gang members anyway).

Nidorf actually has a library, as opposed to the classroom libraries that Clark County had. This is probably due to the fact that Clark County only had three classrooms of kids (that I saw), whereas Nidorf has a huge number. Clark County Juvenile Detention is all in one building in downtown Vancouver, a fairly new and well maintained building. Nidorf is like a run down college campus. In the middle of the complex, surrounded by a huge cyclone fence, is the housing for the "unfits." These are the kids who are going to be tried as adults. The rest of the kids are either in regular units or in the "Special Handling Unit." The "SHU" is for kids who are either getting harrassed in the regular units or who have special needs for some reason or another.

In Clark County, I just sort of sauntered in with the librarian. At Nidorf you have to have your bag x-rayed, go through a metal detector, surrender your id, and wear a visitor's badge. We also didn't have much contact with the kids, at least today. We sorted through a bunch of donated books (sidenote: apparently people think that crappy self-published books or incredibly old and damaged books are perfectly good fare for kids in juvenile detention--they are not), and took them to the various units. I think in Clark County the kids could take books into their rooms--they would borrow them from the classroom library and then (maybe) bring them back. At Nidorf they are not allowed to hold onto books from the library. I'm not quite sure how it works out with the books that we brought to the actual living units. Something tells me that they don't do the summer reading program and hand out Barnes and Noble gift cards in Nidorf either.

Most of the differences have to do with size, I think. There just aren't that many kids in Clark County Juvenile Detention. I think they also have to do with the fact that Nidorf deals with a lot of serious gang violence within the detention center. I got the impression that kids got into trouble on a more individual basis in Clark County Juvenile Detention.

Overall it seemed pretty familiar. Some of the same books that were popular in Clark County are popular here (the Dave Pelzer "A Child Called It" series). It has the same highly sad and depressing feeling. You have the same mix of people who really want to help the kids out versus the people who just make it a bureaucratic nightmare. Oh yes! that is the other thing I wanted to mention. The place is so bureaucratic and decentralized, people who worked right next to each other had no idea what the other did or who they even were. People in the school had never even been to certain areas of Nidorf and didn't know where they were.

So yes, sad and depressing, but you also have the little bit of hope when you see how excited they are to read. That is another similarity between the two facilities--when you have nothing else to do, reading becomes cool and exciting. I think that is the saddest part to me; you see that the kids are excited to read, ask for new books, discuss books with you, and yet here they are, in juvenile detention. I think that we, as library volunteers, have to keep trying to make a difference and hope that we affect their lives in a positive way.