County Comparisons & Highlights
What stands out when all 55 filings sit side by side. Every figure below comes from a county’s own 2025 JJCPA-YOBG report as posted on oycr.ca.gov; every county name links to its dashboard view, where each number sits one click from the official PDF it came from.
The big systems
Los Angeles ($100.3M) is the largest budget in the state — nearly a quarter of all reported spending — across 31 program entries. A single entry, Camps, absorbs $37.1M: 97% of the county’s entire YOBG allocation. In its court data, 1,133 of 2,071 wardship placements (55%) were to a young person’s own or a relative’s home.
Orange ($36.6M — second only to LA) is the custody-heaviest county in the dashboard: 1,024 of its 1,650 wards (62%) were placed in secure county facilities, and $19.6M of YOBG runs “Juvenile Facilities Programming,” including $4.1M of administrative overhead. A small tell in its books: every JJCPA program carries an identical $6,055 admin charge — a flat allocation rather than actual cost. Its own trend analysis notes a 50% arrest decline since 2015.
San Bernardino ($36.1M) reports the largest unexplained capital-type charge in any filing: $9,175,628 on an “Other Expenditures” line labeled simply “Infrastructure,” inside a single $25.9M YOBG supervision entry. A separate $1,975,116 residential placement program was funded entirely outside JJCPA-YOBG, and is disclosed as such.
San Diego ($27.6M) runs the most bifurcated model in the state: JJCPA flows almost entirely to community-based contracts — the Community Assessment Team/Juvenile Diversion contract alone is $7.5M — while 99.7% of its YOBG, $14.08M, is one camp program, HOPE, including $2.6M of administrative overhead.
Riverside ($26.2M) concentrates $17.1M — 95% of its YOBG — in a single custodial entry, the Youth Treatment and Education Center, $3.2M of it administrative overhead. Its placement table has the strangest shape in the state: 502 of 593 wardship placements (85%) are filed under “Other,” a category most counties leave at zero.
Santa Clara consolidates $20.7M into just three blocks — Community Safety & Well-Being, Prevention, and Intervention — where Alameda ($16.7M) itemizes 33 named programs and vendors. The two Bay Area giants are transparency opposites.
Placement patterns
Secure facilities dominate wardship placements in Madera — 30 of 33 wards (91%), the highest share in the state — in Ventura (159 of 208, 76%), and in Sonoma (307 of 448, 69%). Sonoma pairs that with 449 of its 539 court dispositions ending in wardship.
Ventura is a study in contrast: one of only three counties — with Humboldt and Madera — where informal probation is the leading court outcome, and by far the largest of them (291 of 555 dispositions, 52%). Yet when its courts do order wardship, three quarters of placements are secure. Its books have their own signature: 16 of its 24 programs carry an identical $8,826 salaries line alongside each community contract.
Contra Costa logged 164 technical violations of probation against just 85 petitions — nearly two per petition, the highest rate in the state. Monterey shows the pattern at scale: 470 technical violations against 463 petitions. And San Diego recorded the most outright — 556, against 464 court dispositions.
Santa Cruz and Nevada lean the other way: Santa Cruz recorded more diversions than petitions (128 vs 107), and Nevada’s informal probation and diversions (163) outnumber its petitions (55) three to one.
Demographic disparities, as reported
San Francisco’s filing shows Black youth as 342 of 719 referrals (48%), 185 of 356 petitions (52%), and 424 of 867 arrests (49%).
Monterey reports the most concentrated figures in the state: Hispanic youth are 803 of 907 referrals (89%), 414 of 463 petitions (89%), and 444 of 496 arrests (90%).
On the North Coast, Native youth appear in the counties’ referral tables at some of the highest shares anywhere: Del Norte 22 of 77 (29%), Humboldt 42 of 187 (22%) — with the county’s own note that its “Indian” row title stands for American Indian/Alaskan Native, displayed verbatim — Siskiyou 15 of 73 (21%), and Mendocino 49 of 489 (10%).
The San Joaquin Valley
The Valley’s eight counties spent $46.8M combined, and six of them — Kern, Tulare, Stanislaus, Merced, Madera, and Kings — enter zero dollars on the reports’ community-based-organizations line. Only San Joaquin (8.5%) and Fresno (8.1%) book anything there, both at well under half the statewide 19-cent share; counted by that line, about three cents of every Valley youth-justice dollar reaches community organizations. But the line is an accounting choice, and the filings themselves show it undercounts: Kern ($9.5M, nearly 84 cents of its dollar in staff salaries) pays Garden Pathways — a Bakersfield community nonprofit — $708,816 under “Professional Services,” and Merced names Lifeline Community Development Corporation, the Youth Leadership Institute, and the Rise to Higher Grounds Cafe, $319,202 combined, on the same line. In the Valley, even the community money is booked as vendor procurement.
Kings puts its entire JJCPA allocation, $602,587 to the dollar, into a single unit — the F.A.V.O.R. Unit — and reports zero secure county placements and zero technical violations, yet holds the state’s highest private-facility placement share: 33 of 78 wards (42%). Merced reports every one of its 142 wardship placements under “Other,” with zero in any named category. And neither Kings nor Stanislaus filed a race table in any section of its report.
San Joaquin’s arrest mix is the most felony-heavy in the state — 492 of its 595 arrests (83%) were felonies. Three of the eight counties statewide that left the legally required trend analysis blank sit in the Valley: Madera, Merced, and San Joaquin. The Valley also holds the state’s steepest self-reported long-term decline: Tulare, arrests down 73% since 2010 by its own filing.
The detention economy
Modoc ($201,724) is the purest example: every one of its six entries is a contract with another county or vendor — juvenile hall beds from Shasta, Sonoma, El Dorado, and Yolo — plus one $8,605.50 dorm lease so a young person could attend Santa Rosa Junior College.
Lake has the smallest budget in the state ($40,872), reported zero JJCPA spending, and spends what it has buying beds from San Luis Obispo and Sutter’s Camp Singer. Amador buys a Tuolumne County juvenile hall bed for $71,800.
Sierra ($77,401 — second-smallest) reported zero juvenile arrests for the entire year, and Trinity reported zero petitions filed.
What does not add up
Ten programs across the state print totals that do not match their own line items, each flagged individually on the dashboard — from $2.62 in Plumas to $116,033 in Sonoma. Fresno’s Family Behavioral Health entry prints a total of $213,766 over line items summing to $107,415 — a $106,351 gap — and San Diego’s largest contract is off by exactly $100.
Solano invented its own correction system: the numbers it reported to the state DOJ, with the county’s revised counts beside them in asterisked parentheses, and a new placement category it labeled “Secure Track SB823” — all displayed on its county view in the county’s own words. Its JJCPA books also include a $238,039 building lease.
Eight counties left the legally required trend analysis blank: Calaveras, Inyo, Madera, Merced, Modoc, Placer, Sacramento ($23.6M — the largest of them), and San Joaquin. And three counties — Colusa, Glenn, and Mono — posted no report at all.