Creative Commons/Urban Sprouts

Gardening at Log Cabin Ranch

It almost seems too perfect. A dozen high-level juvenile offenders sit at new computers in an immaculate, cheerfully decorated classroom, studying their high school transcripts and taking online quizzes to catch up on credits. Outside, one 16-year-old shows off an album of nature photography he’s been working on, while another points out the flowers and vegetables he’s been tending in the garden. It’s a cloudless, 80-degree day in La Honda, and you would think someone had managed to rig the weather in order impress our small tour group.

I finally got a chance this week to visit Log Cabin Ranch, the famously troubled San Mateo wilderness compound for infamously troubled San Francisco youth who have been unsuccessful in other programs or institutions. Since the mid-1990s, local media have run stories every few years about the ranch—how it’s long been a dilapidated facility where young souls go to rot.

The kids here (17 at the moment) have already spent time in juvenile halls, group homes or foster care. Most are high–level offenders: violence or gun charges. For at least 15 years, San Francisco judges, child advocates and others have expressed concern over the ranch, some even demanding its closure, citing a sparse roster of weak programs and crumbling architecture reminiscent of an abandoned army barracks.

“When we walked in five years ago, our jaws dropped,” says Allen Nance, assistant chief of juvenile probation, recalling his first visit to the ranch. “That image is still emblazoned in my memory.”

Nance and Chief of Juvenile Probation William Siffermann came to San Francisco from Chicago about five years ago and have been trying to turn the ranch around ever since. Changes came slowly for the first three years as Nance and Siffermann worked to procure funding and rally city agencies and nonprofits to their cause. Things started coming together last year when a bill passed in Sacramento allocating funding to counties that treated juvenile offenders locally instead of sending them to the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice. The result is an impressive transformation, but some who haven’t seen it remain skeptical.

When I called the chief a couple of weeks ago and told him I’d been hearing good things about the new programs at the ranch, he sounded like he was going to fall off his chair.

“What?” he said, laughing. “You’ve been hearing good things?

I’ve been hearing about Chief Siffermann for some time now. A cop once told me that Siffermann should step down and that the ranch should be closed. A friend on the Juvenile Justice Commission said to me that Siffermann is a hands-on chief, fiercely protective of the kids in his charge. When you meet the chief in person, he’s a husky guy with a Chicago accent. No matter what you ask him, you half expect him to answer, “Da Bears.”

During our past phone interviews, he was always accommodating but quick to shut down any insinuation that he and his staff have anything but the best interests of the kids at heart, or that they aren’t breaking their backs to improve the ranch.

I understand how he feels. When I used to work in residential treatment programs for troubled youth, my agency’s directors would occasionally show up to conduct surprise inspections. My staff would be reprimanded for little things, like deviating from the state-mandated menu plan (for instance: waffles for breakfast instead of oatmeal). My typical response was: You’ve got to be kidding. These kids used to steal knives from the kitchen to assault people; now they ask permission to use knives at breakfast.

The youth-guided tour of the ranch indicates similar progress for the boys at Log Cabin.

The on-site school is now run by the San Francisco Unified School District. In one classroom, a boy shows me some plastic science models he’s been working on.

“Oh, nice,” I say. “DNA models.”

“Uh, molecule models,” he says, correcting me. “Science is my favorite subject.”

Like all the ranch’s common spaces, the library is immaculate and tricked out with new furniture. It’s technically a San Francisco Public Library branch and kids can order books to be delivered.

“I see the kids pass up the pool hall and the ping pong hall and vie for space in the library,” the chief says.

That might be because the library is where the ranch’s Nintendo Wii resides.

“We come in here to play the Wii, but we check out books before we leave to read later,” says one of the boys. “I wasn’t into reading as much before I got here.”

The main dormitory is now divided into two smaller pods. Fresh paint, new carpeting and wood-framed beds have replaced cracked walls, bare floors and metal bunks. Group meetings take place in the dorm each day.

“The people who have been here longer basically run the group,” says one of the boys. “We run our own pod, hold each other accountable. I like talking with groups just to see how somebody else sees something. I start thinking I can see it that way, too.”

“Are you going to miss this place when you leave?” I ask.

“Here, not so much,” he says. “But I’m going to miss the people around here, being around staff, having people to talk to.

Outside, the chief prompts a kid to tell me about the time the boy peacefully removed himself from an altercation on a basketball court. I ask the kid if he would have handled the situation that way in his neighborhood before he came to Log Cabin.

“There’s probably going to be a fight,” he says. “It never would have been talking one-on-one.”

What used to be a run-down tennis court is now a garden. The boys tend to what grows in individual planter boxes, which they built themselves. The program, led by Urban Sprouts and the San Francisco Conservation Corps, runs three days a week. The ranch’s chef makes salads from the garden’s bounty: peppers, chocolate mint, arugula, tomatoes.

“I visited the ranch back in the ‘90s,” says Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ). “I got a look at their culinary program. It was a hot plate with a sauce pan on top.”

Macallair is famously critical of state-run detention centers and programs that have earned Log Cabin-type reputations. He’s says the architecture and cosmetics of a facility are crucial to its therapeutic value but that program is paramount to successful rehabilitation.

“The California model is a congregate institutional model,” says Macallair “It’s always been a bad model. It’s from the 19th Century. The Missouri model is therapeutic.”

The Missouri Model is a nationally replicated rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders living in residential settings. The program integrates youth, families, treatment staff and community groups. It’s heavy on education and vocational training and employs counselors instead of guards, relying on positive peer culture, where kids keep each other in check.

Macallair hasn’t seen the new changes. He sounds understandably skeptical hearing about them on the phone but says Siffermann has made strides in bringing together the components for success.

“Bill arrived about five years ago, from Chicago, with a history as a reformer,” Macallair says. “To Bill’s credit, he realized he was not in Chicago anymore and didn’t have all the pieces he needed. And he’s done more with the nonprofit sector than anybody.”

Siffermann brought out trainers from Missouri as soon as state funding would allow it. He’s implemented several of the Missouri protocols and philosophies, focusing heavily on families, peer accountability, staff/resident relationships, re-entry plans and aftercare. According to Nance, last year six ranch graduates were enrolled at City College of San Francisco.

“A lot of programs are meant to achieve compliance with offenders,” Nance says. “We’re trying to change attitudes and beliefs that affect conduct. Make no mistake, the expectation is correctional, but the model is rehabilitative.”

The chief agrees. “We want to create our own adaptation of [the Missouri] model,” he says. “We want the San Francisco model.”

After the tour, the chief lets on that he knows what we’re thinking.”

“How’d you like our picks from central casting,” he says, joking that the boys giving the tour were actors, hired to make a good impression.

No doubt the chief, his staff and the kids put their best foot forward during our tour. The ranch isn’t perfect and, despite the mountainside setting, things there aren’t always idyllic. The night before my visit, a boy put his fist through a window after learning that his aunt had died.

But there’s no denying that conditions at the ranch today bear little resemblance to the horror stories we’ve been hearing about the place for years; you simply can’t fake the kind of progress on display. San Francisco Supervisor Sean Elsbernd was on the tour with me, and the chief hopes Mayor Gavin Newsom will visit the ranch soon. He should. And he should talk to the kids who have committed crimes and are now doing their time. I asked a boy if living at the ranch felt like a punishment.

“At first it seemed like punishment, everybody seeing time, seeing those months,” he said. “But I benefited. Now, I just see it as a vacation from all that city madness.”