FEAR STALKS TEENS AT JAIL : CROWDING PUSHES TENSION TO LIMIT.

Byline: Christopher Noxon Daily News Staff Writer

She knows she's back when she gets her first whiff. It is a strange and instantly familiar odor of mashed potatoes, industrial disinfectant and too many young bodies packed too closely together.

It is the smell of Clifton Tatum Center, the maximum-security lockup for juvenile offenders in Ventura County. The girl with the shaved neckline and the pimply chin knows it all too well. Although she is only 17, she has been here 20 times before.

She was first brought to Clifton Tatum five years ago, after stealing a friend's cassette player. Later, she had a fistfight with her mother, who pressed assault charges against her. Since then, she has fled more than a dozen group homes. And each time she is caught, she is given a longer sentence in juvenile hall.

It seems to get worse every time she goes inside. More and more kids are packed in. An average of 84 inmates were held here each day the year she arrived. This year the average was 107, all in a building designed to hold 84.

``It's a madhouse in here,'' said the teen-ager, whose name is being withheld to protect her safety. ``Everybody is rushing everybody. There's always fights, always people yelling at each other. You feel like you don't have enough air to breathe.''

When the population at the Ventura facility surges, the girl and the other inmates must spend more time in their cells. With 37 officers, there just aren't enough guards to supervise the common areas.

It's hard to think straight when it gets so crowded, she says. Other girls arrive to share her 8-by-10-foot cinder-block cell built for one. Between her bunk and the extra mattress on the floor there are just a few vacant square feet to stand in. In activity rooms and the yard outside, tension boils over into fights nearly every day.

``Some days you just sit in your room and get angry,'' she said. ``Your mind is rushing all the time. You just keep thinking about wanting to get out, wanting to get out.''

The girl has spent a good portion of her teen-age years - including four birthdays - inside juvenile hall wanting to get out. Officials say about 85 percent of the juveniles held at Clifton Tatum have been inside before. Together, they have contributed to what county officials call a crisis in corrections.

Juvenile arrests jumped 42 percent from 1993 to 1995, hitting a record high last year of 2,324 arrests, according to the Ventura County Sheriff's Department. Most of those arrested wind up at the Clifton Tatum Center or the Frank A. Colston Youth Center across the street. Serious offenders are sent to the California Youth Authority.

The population at Clifton Tatum has jumped 114 percent over the past decade, split between kids awaiting court dates and those serving sentences of up to a year. About 10 percent to 15 percent are girls, housed with the younger boys in a separate unit.

The crowding creates an environment officials fear can do more harm than good for the young offenders. Clifton Tatum is not a place where juveniles face their wrongdoing in cold isolation. The sheer numbers generate a tension that faintly crackles like the fluorescent light that floods the hallways.

Inmates say there is little room for introspection in a place where you must hold your tongue and weigh the odds. The reminders are acted out in full view. A boy is brought to the floor and kicked in the head. Two rival gang members trade punches, their shouts drowned out by the hiss of a shower head.

``You got to watch your back, 'cause you might get rushed any time,'' one inmate said. ``It's like a game - it never stops.''

Crowded conditions have led to a number of proposals, from premature release programs - which inmates affectionately call ``early kicks'' - to electronic monitoring, with kids monitored at home by ankle tags linked by radio wave to an alarm. Officials also hope to find relief with the recently approved boot camp for young offenders in the mountains north of Santa Barbara.

But corrections officials have pinned their highest hopes on Proposition 205, which would make $350 million available to build more jails for California juveniles. Ventura County officials want to use their share for a $20 million juvenile justice center containing jail cells, courtrooms and offices.

``Prop. 205 is a boon to juvenile facilities,'' said Chris Weidenheimer, supervising deputy probation officer. ``Without it, we're still going to have the desperate need, we'll just eventually have to bite the bullet and build the facility with county money. This would just get us what we need sooner with money from the state.''

Inside Clifton Tatum, such political and financial prospects seem a distant reality. The only numbers that count here are found on the ``pop sheet'' - the daily tabulation of the inmate population.

When the numbers climb over 90, officials make room by shaving up to five days off the sentence of those inmates incarcerated for less serious crimes or first offenses. That leaves about 40 percent charged with such violent crimes as assault, rape and murder.

The remaining inmates are those with long criminal backgrounds, though often involving minor offenses. Many kids, for instance, have served 10 or more sentences for a single robbery. They keep coming back because they continue to violate parole, bolt from placement homes or fail drug tests.

As a result, the population includes gang members with long histories of violence and troubled children who just don't do what the courts say. Staff tries to separate violent offenders from vulnerable ones, but it is still an extremely volatile mix, said Terry Warnock, the supervisor of Clifton Tatum.

``The violence just keeps escalating,'' Warnock said. ``It used to be when you had murderers or rapists, they stood out in your mind and you knew who they were. Now, we sometimes get two guys charged with murder who have the same last name. It's difficult to keep straight.''

Guards make it their business to know which inmates are gang members and who their enemies are. Even so, fights break out often, says Carl Brewer, a corrections officer in the unit that houses the oldest and most serious offenders.

With his enormous chest and bald head, Brewer is built like a fire hydrant - he can stop a fight by glancing in its direction. That doesn't stop kids from trying to sneak things past him.

``They're always trying to get one over on us,'' he said. ``They got nothing else to do. They're here 24 hours a day. They watch us just as much as we watch them.''

The day at Clifton begins at 6 a.m. with showers, cleanup and a breakfast one inmate describes as ``dog food.'' Classes are taught by teachers from the Ventura County Superintendent's Office and continue from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Afterward, inmates alternate among their cell, an activity room in their unit and an asphalt yard outside. Many inmates break up the monotony by doing chores to earn rewards, like punch and popcorn and later bedtimes.

Bedtime for inmates who don't do extra chores can come at 6:30 p.m., way too early for a 15-year-old busy folding sweat pants in the laundry room. A gang member from Oxnard who has been here nine times, for everything from battery to possession of methamphetamine, says keeping busy gives him time away from the other kids.

``When it gets real packed, you just start stressing,'' he said. ``It gets you mad and you want to go off on someone. You get anxious and that's how it starts.''

He bobs up and down and tightens his ample fists as he describes two fights he's had inside. One time, another inmate punched him as they passed in the hall. The other fight was gang-related, stopped by a guard who appeared in a mist of pepper spray.

The youth finds a little refuge here, stocking shelves with neatly folded uniforms, shoes and hygiene kits. He listens to a radio tuned to Power 106 and thinks about getting out, seeing his girlfriend and spending time with his friends. He should get out in 60 days, but he's hoping for an early release.

Even if he gets an early kick, he acknowledges he'll probably be back.

``I chose my life and this is it,'' he said. ``I can't stop it anymore.''

Some inmates don't take out their aggression on others - they direct their rage at themselves. Two minors have hanged themselves here since juvenile hall opened 41 years ago.

The guards now keep ``suicide knives'' clipped to their belts in case they need to slice through a taut towel or sock.

Kids who are out of control are sent to the ``safety cell,'' an 11-foot square cubicle with cushioned walls painted a sickening pink. They usually settle down in less than an hour.

Warnock worries that the crowding nudges the inmates closer to the line that separates good behavior from tantrums or fights.

``We're not here to baby them,'' she said. ``But if you're kept in a little cement room most of the day and every once in a while you go outside to a little asphalt yard, it's got to influence how you look at the world.''

That's not just a theory, said a 16-year-old from Santa Paula. A compact kid with long eyelashes and a moon-shaped face, he's too small to burn energy during pickup basketball games. So he sits inside, doodling on a note pad and talking with other kids around a table.

He's been inside eight times before on charges including robbery, assault and weapons possession. This time, he's serving a sentence for beating a man outside an elementary school. It was supposed to be a robbery, but he and two friends were so drunk they forgot to take the man's money.

``I tapped him on the shoulder and when he turned around I just popped him,'' he said. ``He just went down, boom, like that. I got all happy.''

He says he plans to get out of his gang and go to work for a city cleaning crew when he's released.

He looks down at his forearms, printed in elaborate tattoo script that reads ``Bad Boy.''

``I wish I never followed the people I did,'' he said. ``But it's too late now. Sometimes I wish I could start my whole life over again, but I can't.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

Photo: (1--color in SIMI edition only) A teen-age inmate walks to class at the Clifton Tatum Center in Ventura County. Safety procedures call for the juveniles to keep their hands behind their backs.

(2--ran in SIMI and CONEJO editions only--color in CONEJO only) Youth offenders watch television in one of the common areas at the maximum-security lockup facility, where the inmate population has jumped 114 percent over the past decade.

(3) Overcrowding has led to doubling up in cells, where a teen sleeps on a mattress on the floor in what is a one-person cell.

(4) County Corrections Officer Paul Pena checks on an inmate, where offenders are required to keep their shoes outside their cells.

David Richard Crane/Daily News