For the record :
7:47 p.m. Feb. 8, 2024 : A previous version of this article said that one commissioner compared a letter from the state board to “a dog with no bite.” The commissioner said “a bite with no teeth.”
Nine months after state regulators ordered Los Angeles County officials to transfer hundreds of youths out of two troubled juvenile halls, they are now considering closing a third hall — the one that probation officials recently reopened to appease regulators in the first place.
The Board of State and Community Corrections sent a letter Wednesday to Probation Department Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa detailing numerous persistent problems inside Los Padrinos, including too few staff on hand, not enough safety checks and too little programming.
The letter said the county had not followed its own plan to fix the facility’s problems and that it was now at risk of being shut down after consistently failing to comply with a number of state regulations. Regulators were considering the same fate for the youths still at the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, where inspections turned up similar issues.