By Victoria Valenzuela
This article was originally published by Truthout
Having enshrined youths’ right to hug parents during visits behind bars, activists are pushing for decarceration.
Mercedes Maradiaga sat across from her 19-year-old son in the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles in complete devastation. Her son had at that point been incarcerated at the prison for two years and she had visited him every weekend. But that day in September 2024 was especially hard because it was their first visit since he had been beaten by officers earlier that week in a space in the jail where there were no cameras. The guards had jumped on and kicked him, and he needed surgery for a torn ACL. All she wanted was to give him a hug and reassure him that she was there. However, because of the no-contact visit policies at Los Padrinos, she was unable to give him that comfort.
Even during birthdays and holidays, they weren’t allowed to embrace. The boy endured the jail’s horrible living conditions — including rat infestations and flooded toilets — but couldn’t hug his mom for a moment of escape.
“I couldn’t even let him know I’m here just with the little hug,” Maradiaga said. “It would have meant everything to him. It was sad, and I did that for four years.”
Los Padrinos had reopened a year earlier in 2023, after being shut down in 2019 due to conditions that violated the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) standards, including abuses by staff. Six officers were criminally charged with assault and child abuse for using pepper spray on several teenage girls. Reports also cited a decreasing youth population as a factor for closure, yet staff claimed to feel “outnumbered.” When Los Padrinos closed, youth were shuffled to another facility called Central Juvenile Hall — and then in 2023, that facility was closed down due to similar issues. Los Padrinos reopened, and just months later, the abuses restarted. In 2025, 30 officers were criminally charged by the California Attorney General with child endangerment and abuse, conspiracy, and battery for encouraging “gladiator fights” that pit youth against each other.
Olivia Shields, a justice transformation policy coordinator at Urban Peace Institute, described the constant closing and reopening of BSCC facilities as a “cycle of noncompliance.” Shields said the Los Angeles County Probation Department has ultimately failed with these maneuvers to address the core issue: unmet youth needs — which won’t be addressed through incarceration but through coordinated care in the form of individualized, robust support systems and resources.
“Rather than decarcerate these populations of young people and find community-based alternatives or step-downs for as many of them as possible, they basically shift the youth around from facility to facility to avoid noncompliance,” Shields said.
Long before the closing of Los Padrinos in 2019, the facility had a bad reputation among Angelenos. Maradiaga recalled hearing disturbing stories about the facility in the ’80s when she was a kid.
“I think it needs to be shut down,” Maradiaga said. “I think that there needs to be a better way for the youth. I don’t think locking them away from their family is the answer.”
Barred From Basic Human Contact
When Ilana Parach, executive director and co-founder of Hoops 4 Justice, went inside Los Padrinos with a basketball and mentorship program, she quickly learned about what youth were facing inside. She felt it was important to give them a platform to express their needs directly, so she pivoted to working with them on legislation.
“They made a list of specific programs they wanted — resources for their families, reentry support,” Parach said. “At the bottom of that list, they wrote, ‘We want to hug our moms.’”
Incarcerated youth directly told her that one parent who hugged her son during a visit on his birthday then had her visit terminated and future visits suspended for two weeks. She said another youth was incarcerated for three years and had no choice but to watch his mother cry during the visits because she couldn’t hug him.
Contact visitation policies vary across California and are often left at the discretion of correctional officers. Parach said youth and staff both told her that Los Padrinos stopped allowing contact visits after the pandemic. Parach said that during meetings of the board of supervisors, she heard officers citing staffing shortages, financial issues, and concerns about drugs as reasons for disallowing contact visits. Still, visitors have to go through extensive screening when they come through a facility, including going through body scanners, sniffing by drug dogs, and X-ray scanners for their belongings.
“How could a young person’s parent bring in those drugs into a facility when they cannot even hug their loved one,” said Emily Zamora, policy and campaign coordinator at Youth Justice Coalition, an abolitionist organization that empowers impacted youth to dismantle the system.
Parach knew it wasn’t right that the youth weren’t allowed to embrace their family members, so she brought elected officials in to hear their stories. One of the elected officials who visited was California Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, who later introduced the Hug Act, the bill authored by the youth. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law on September 27. The newly passed law will make it a right for all youth in juvenile detention centers to hug their parents, no longer leaving it at the discretion of the probation department that oversees the youth facilities.
Parach said it is important to center young people and amplify their voices.
“I think that they have to keep the kids at the center of the decisions,” Parach said. “Not just figuratively, but I think youth literally have to continue to provide direct input because they’re the ones that understand their needs the most, and making decisions about them without them is a detriment to all of us.”
Abolishing Youth Incarceration
Many youth advocates, youth, and families say the Hug Act was long overdue.
“It’s really devastating that it has taken up to this point towards this becoming legislation … for young people to be able to hug their loved ones,” Zamora said. “But the fact that this has been like something that hasn’t been around is honestly inhumane.”
Now, some of the organizers who had pushed to make the Hug Act a reality are continuing their longer struggle: shutting down dangerous facilities like Los Padrinos, and decarcerating youth out of the system altogether.
Shields said it’s inhumane not to allow young people who are going through the worst experience in their lives to hug their loved ones and experience the kind of comfort that they and their loved ones desperately need in these moments. And beyond that, incarcerated youth have been shuffled around various facilities as they have opened and closed and reopened.
Shields said that after Los Padrinos reopened in 2023, “It was just pure chaos. Because this was like a dilapidated facility that hadn’t been used in years, and it hadn’t been updated in any way, shape, or form, and then you’re just putting a bunch of young people there.”
“Detention is not a place where young people will have their needs met,” Shields said. “The culture of probation and the culture of the way that they’re treating young people … is so deeply entrenched. It’s not something that we can reform our way out of.”
Justice advocates in Los Angeles have been calling out the youth incarceration system for years. In 2022, their campaign to put pressure on the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors resulted in the creation of the Department of Youth Development (DYD) to transition to a care-first approach. Shields said DYD is a county-run entity, which involves navigating tough bureaucratic barriers. The department and the work that they are building is new, requiring constant tending and resources from the board, as well as work to stay rooted in the vision and strategy of youth and community advocates.
Shields and Zamora believe in community-based care and alternatives to incarceration, rather than youth detention. They are also proponents of credible messenger programs in which someone from an organization connects youth to resources and opportunities both while they are incarcerated and after they return home so they have a support system when they leave, with the ultimate aim of decarceration.
“A lot of the young people that we work with will talk about why a credible messenger was so much more impactful for them than a probation officer and being incarcerated,” Shields said.
Zamora said detained youth have told her about many cases of medical neglect in Los Padrinos. In one case that her organization highlighted at the time, she says a young person drank bleach to get the attention of staff and finally get seen by a nurse. She said she also heard about a teenager in Los Padrinos who didn’t get to hug their parent before the parent passed away because of the no-contact visiting policy. Additionally, she has heard a lot about overdoses in the facility. She said Los Padrinos should have stayed closed given its huge track record of corruption and abuse.
The Youth Justice Coalition operates in a space that previously operated as the David V. Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center courthouse, where youth were detained and often given long sentences. Zamora said the transformation of the building from a punitive space into a place where youth find community and empowerment, as well as a garden and high school for system-impacted youth, gives her hope for what abolition can look like.
“This space is such a testament to what it looks like to shut down facilities that do not serve our communities and do not serve our young people … so that we could support these young people in being who they can be under the conditions that they deserve,” Zamora said.
Shields said there is a coalition of youth justice organizations in Los Angeles that will continue drawing attention to the conditions inside, showing up to the BSCC and board of supervisors’ meetings, and amplifying what they have been hearing from young people about how egregious those conditions are.
“We can’t incarcerate our way out of lack of safety,” Shields said, adding that instead we must find “a way to not reform but transform the youth justice system so that it really is rooted in love, care, healing, and a different form of accountability.”
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