It’s Bed Time at Juvenile Hall : Certification: Los Padrinos facility frantically makes its own mattresses to put charges to rest.

A county juvenile hall in Downey became a mattress factory on Thursday as workers frantically stitched, stuffed and stacked four new beds an hour in an effort to bring the facility into compliance with state regulations.

The frantic effort at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall came a day after the California Youth Authority decertified the overcrowded 33-year-old facility because minors were sleeping on the floor and it failed to meet fire safety codes.

That action made Los Angeles County highly vulnerable to liability lawsuits, and raised the possibility of potentially dangerous minors being released because Los Padrinos was declared unfit for detention, CYA officials said.

In the scramble for recertification, truckloads of foam and fabric arrived at Los Padrinos on Thursday morning. By noon, a dozen welfare recipients had been rounded up and put to work over sewing machines and cutting tables. Their mission: produce 340 of the 12-inch-thick mattresses by noon Monday.

“We believe that by the end of the working day Monday, we will be able to ask the Youth Authority to reinspect Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall for recertification,” said Phil Stein, chief of operations for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. The facility has been allowed to continue housing the youths.

“We brought in four seamstresses and sent other people out to buy foam cores and covering material,” said Gene DeSoto, deputy director of detention services. “The sewing machines are humming away.”

The CYA’s action took county supervisors by surprise. On Thursday, Supervisor Ed Edelman said he was distressed that probation officials had not notified the Board of Supervisors.

“I’m going to ask for a report on Tuesday before the Board of Supervisors asking the Probation Department to respond to the state’s decertification--why the situation arose and why the board wasn’t notified,” Edelman said.

In May, the CYA notified the Probation Department that Los Padrinos did not meet fire codes, allowed minors to sleep on the floor, did not process health reports in a timely fashion and failed to fill gopher holes in an athletic field at the park-like facility.

The department was given 60 days to correct the problems. Los Padrinos was designed to hold 401 minors but their number has recently swelled to 741. The minors are awaiting trial or serving sentences for crimes ranging from petty theft to murder.

The CYA’s notice prompted probation officials to examine a host of alternatives to the bedding problem, which they deemed the most serious.

They considered buying cots, but feared minors could fashion weapons out of the metal legs. They looked at molded plastic beds, but determined they probably wouldn’t pass fire inspections. They even placed an emergency order for 700 mattresses with a vendor in Stockton, who said he could not deliver them on time.

So, in exasperation, they set up an assembly line Thursday morning in a workshop at Los Padrinos and started mass-producing mattresses themselves.

George Davis, director of general services at the facility, estimated the cost of each makeshift mattress to be about $25. Commercial mattresses of the same size and material, by comparison, would have cost about $95 each.

Juvenile Court Judge Jaime Corral, who works closely with probation officials, saw a possible bright side to the situation.

“This is a perfect illustration of what happens when people ignore things too long,” Corral said. “On the other hand, it made people desperate and creative.”