SACRAMENTO – Today, Chief Jim Salio, President of the Chief Probation Officers of California (CPOC), issued the following statement in response to Governor Brown’s State Budget Proposal:

“We applaud the Governor for recognizing the emerging brain science of transitional age youth in many of his proposals today.  With the success experienced in our juvenile justice system over the past decade, we understand the importance of utilizing our infrastructure to be more responsive to youth we now serve and following brain science to have the greatest impact on young people.  We ask the Governor and the Legislature to expand on the policies discussed today to include how we can invest in our youth and young adults by ensuring our current juvenile halls and camps can efficiently reflect of the needs of the local population as well.

We look forward to working with our partners at DJJ to continue to build out successful and robust evidence based programming at both DJJ and within probation departments to further positively impact the lives of youth. To that end, it would be incongruent to continue to charge counties the fee for DJJ use. We renew our call for the elimination of that fee in order to reinvest that funding for local programming.”