Youth Offenders Program (YOP)

ZONA SECA, Inc.
Working to Make Our Community a Safer Place for Everyone


  • Zona Seca's new Youth Offenders Program (YOP) provides specialized services to meet the needs of young people. Under the watchcare of this new YOP service, minors (under the age of 21) who have been cited for possession of alcohol, for attempting to buy alcohol, or for biking under the influence, and so forth, may now enter this program, in lieu of losing their driver's license for a year, for a modest fee of $75 (for ages 15, 16, and 17) and $100 (for ages 18, 19 and 20).

  • Not unlike the Drug Diversion Program, the Youth Offenders Program also engages offenders in a variety of appropriate, and hopefully, behavior-changing educational activities and support services.

  • The YOP consists of four segments totaling nine hours and takes only six to ten weeks to complete:

    1. During the first segment (an Introduction to the program rules, goals and objectives that lasts about an hour), the young people have an opportunity to talk about their citations and to get supportive feedback from program counselors and peers.

      2. In the second half of this segment, a coroner from the Sheriff's Department takes an hour to present a slide show reviewing cases, mostly of youth in the same age group, who overdosed or who suffered major trauma in automobile accidents; and opportunity for discussion is offered. These first two segments together comprise one day's program activities.

    2. A visit to the Santa Barbara Rehabilitation Institute fills the three hours of the third segment. During this visit, a counselor at the Institute talks to the young people about spinal injury cases and relates these medical traumas to the alcohol abuse that led to their conditions. The youth are shown a video of a typical patient who suffered spinal trauma and had to learn everything over as a result of his injury; as part of this educational experience, the "program kids" actually get into a wheel chair to realize more fully the seriousness of these medical circumstances whose origins began in a "bottle of booze!"

    3. The four-hour fourth segment is a Final Workshop in which the young people turn in a 500-word essay on their experiences and their feelings (i.e., about what they went through) during the YOP encounter. In the concluding sessions, the youth read some specially-targeted articles on drugs and alcohol, fill out a learning workbook, see another educational video, and finally have a group discussion about the laws and why they are enforced. Those who complete all four segments of the course receive their Youth Offenders Program Certificate to take back to Court to salvage their California Driver's License.

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    Updated 22 August 1998
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