Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

As part of Gov. Tim Kaine's budget cuts, Natural Bridge Juvenile Correctional Center will close next month.

Rob Pringle, a teacher at Natural Bridge Juvenile Correctional Center in Rockbridge County, will lose his job when the center closes.

NATURAL BRIDGE STATION -- For decades the state has brought its baby-faced bruisers and pubescent thugs to rural Rockbridge County and transformed them -- mostly -- from juvenile malefactors into law-abiding men.

But Gov. Tim Kaine's administration is shutting down the Natural Bridge Juvenile Correctional Center next month as part of an effort to close a $1.35 billion budget gap. Now, proponents of the center, arguing that it is the best of its kind in the state, are clamoring to keep it open, even as vans have begun hauling some of the roughly 70 misfits away to other institutions.

"We just think this is a terrible mistake," Rob Pringle, who teaches carpentry at Natural Bridge, said of the governor's decision. "I can do with one less rest stop, or raise my cigarette tax another buck. There must be something else we can do."

According to the state, there isn't: Times are lean, and even good programs are being lopped. "There's a certain amount of money I have to cut," said Barry Green, director of the state Department of Juvenile Justice, which runs the Natural Bridge center. "I wouldn't be surprised if the General Assembly made more cuts."

The Natural Bridge center, with neither concertina wire nor fences, is not a holding pen, its advocates argue, but a critical open-campus way station in juvenile delinquents' transition from a life of confinement to adult freedom. Unlike delinquents at the state's other juvenile facilities, those at Natural Bridge -- generally the least violent and disruptive -- can hold down jobs under a work-release program, and they can leave the center to attend classes at Dabney S. Lancaster Community College.

Meanwhile, volunteers from Washington and Lee, Southern Virginia and Liberty universities come to Natural Bridge to tutor the troubled teens.

Deshawn White, 21, who now lives in Roanoke, said he spent five years confined in the juvenile justice system after committing a strong-arm robbery as a 13-year-old. The final year he spent at Natural Bridge changed his life, he said.

"When I came into the system I was like a loose cannon, I just didn't care about anything," said White, originally of Norfolk. "Now, I'm assistant manager at Hardee's, I have my GED and I've got my own place. Life is like heaven."

Juvenile delinquents at the state's other correctional centers have to stay out of trouble in order to get sent to Natural Bridge, which the state Department of Juvenile Justice says is tasked to help teenagers make the transition to freedom. When it closes, anguish will ripple through the statewide system, said Marge Rose, who has taught science for four years at the Natural Bridge center.

"The young men who come there have to earn the right to come," she said. "It's an incentive for them to improve, and they say, 'We've earned the right to be here.' But if they're sent back to these other centers, they've got to fight for their place again."

"We're kind of the carrot in the whole system -- if he keeps out of trouble, he gets promoted to Natural Bridge," echoed Don Dudley, another teacher at the center. "Now, they're taking the carrot away."

Set along a stretch of narrow blacktop in the woods of Rockbridge County, the Natural Bridge Juvenile Correctional Center was built on the site of a Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps camp. It has housed juveniles since 1964, and today the center operates its own high school and also offers vocational classes such as masonry, carpentry and automotive repair.

Despite its 100-acre size, the center holds one of the smallest populations in the state's juvenile system, and that's one reason it was targeted for closure, said Green, the juvenile agency's director. The center in Beaumont holds up to 264 residents, Bon Air's can hold 193, the Culpeper center can hold 144 and Hanover's can handle 120. Closing one of those facilities would have forced the other centers to absorb a large population.

"I do not want to get in the position of crowding them -- you crowd them, you'll have problems," Green said.

The state has one smaller juvenile center, at Oak Ridge in Chesterfield County, but it serves juveniles with developmental problems. Green said it would have been too difficult to close Oak Ridge and distribute its residents among the other centers.

But supporters of keeping Natural Bridge open said the center, which handles delinquents between the ages of 14 and 20, works too well to sacrifice to budget cuts. The state hopes to save $1.2 million this year by closing the center and cutting 68 jobs.

According to state statistics, there have been 611 serious incidents -- which include everything from fights to sports injuries -- in Virginia's juvenile institutions during the first three quarters of fiscal year 2009. Only nine of those serious incidents occurred at Natural Bridge. In another indication of the center's efficiency, the staff turnover rate was 4.8 percent in fiscal year 2008; statewide the rate was 16.9 percent.

The Rev. Mark Gibson of Bedford, who preaches at the Natural Bridge center every Sunday evening, said the juveniles he's spoken to are distraught over being sent back to the other centers.

"They say the first question they'll be asked is, 'Who do you bang with?' Which means, which gang are you in," Gibson said. "Every one of these boys is going to be tested."

Green, though, said there is nothing to be done: The governor has ordered cuts, and the Natural Bridge center is the only one he can eliminate. It's been an outstanding center, he said, and "we're not pretending we can replicate Natural Bridge." But the young men from Natural Bridge can succeed at the other centers, he said. "Most of them came out of one of those facilities and managed to do well while they were there."