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Dorms Fuel Jail Unrest

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Times Staff Writers

The violence that rocked Los Angeles County’s jail system over the last week is the legacy of operating jails on the cheap -- with violent inmates living in large, open rooms despite wide agreement nationally that such offenders should be held in cells.

Sheriff’s Department officials freely acknowledge that the practice has exacerbated racially charged disturbances in the jails, where violent incidents have increased significantly since 2003. But officials say they have not had the money or the staffing to shift many of the high-risk inmates to newer, cell-equipped facilities, which require more guards.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Feb. 18, 2006 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday February 18, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
Jail expert -- An article in Sunday’s Section A said Nancy Insco was the former head of Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Insco served as the acting director of Maryland’s division of parole and probation from January 2003 to September 2003. She is now a Missouri-based jail consultant.

As a result, the department has 6,500 jail beds with cells designed for high-risk offenders -- but they are either empty or used for lower-risk inmates, because the agency says it doesn’t have the deputies to staff those facilities if they housed more dangerous detainees.

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New York City and Chicago, among other places with large jail systems, do it differently -- each keeping a large percentage of cells available for maximum-security inmates. Moreover, the agencies there have far more deputies guarding inmates per capita than the Sheriff’s Department.

At Cook County Jail in Chicago, for example, one officer monitors each group of 48 high-risk inmates. All can be locked down in two-person cells.

By contrast, at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, where rioting claimed the life of one inmate and injured nearly 100 others, one deputy watches about 300 inmates. Those men are not all in one large space, but the rooms -- or dorms -- where they are held, arranged around a guard station, are still sizable and have no individual cells. Additional deputies are assigned to walk through each dorm hourly.

Overall, Los Angeles County has fewer than 3,000 deputies and civilian assistants to police a jail system with 21,000 inmates a day. Cook County has 2,900 correctional officers for 10,000 inmates. New York has 9,300 officers guarding 14,000 inmates.

The vast majority of those incarcerated in the Los Angeles County system live in dorms or barracks, some housing more than 100 inmates. The only facilities with a significant number of smaller cells -- housing anywhere from one to 10 people -- are the Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, across the street from each other downtown.

For the eighth straight day, violence erupted Saturday at the sprawling Castaic complex. Eight inmates suffered minor injuries when fighting broke out about 4 p.m. in a dorm at the North Facility, sheriff’s officials said. The fighting was quickly controlled, authorities said.

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Like other recent incidents, the violence involved clashes between Latino and African American inmates. Deputies were investigating the incident, and no additional details were immediately available.

The fact that L.A. County deputies have struggled to curb the violence despite racially segregating inmates and imposing lockdowns underscores the difficulty of controlling inmates living together in large rooms, experts said.

“In a dorm situation, it is virtually impossible to quell [violent] activity,” said jail consultant Nancy Insco, former head of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. “It’s almost like a wildfire. It’s like a rolling ball of fire that starts in one dorm and it gains momentum and it jumps to other dorms.”

That occurs because, even if officials boost security measures, inmates are still all locked together in a room and can start fights before deputies can move in.

“There is no such thing as a lockdown in a 100-bed dorm -- that’s in name only,” said Allen Beck, a Missouri-based jail consultant. “That’s like saying you’ve taken care of a hole in a tub when you’re really working on a sieve.”

The Pitchess Detention Center was not designed for today’s predominantly high-risk population. Even the highest-security facility on the property -- the North County Correctional Center -- has about 280 inmates per floor in each four-story building. Each floor has four two-level dorms arranged around a single watch station.

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In addition to the deputy at the station, each building has six deputies responsible for moving the inmates from place to place and walking through the dorms hourly for a security check.

Today, 70% of inmates systemwide are considered high-security risks -- most on their way to state prison, awaiting trial or serving county time for such offenses as parole violations. Sheriff’s officials estimate that as many as 80% of inmates are affiliated with known gangs.

Experts on jail housing, while voicing understanding of the budget problems and staffing constraints here, say the current Los Angeles County jail system is highly prone to continued troubles.

“He’s forced into that,” said Beck of Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision to house so many maximum-security inmates together. “No astute correctional officials will voluntarily put their highest-risk inmates together like that.”

Even those counties that do rely on large dormitories use more deputies than Los Angeles County does, the prison authorities said.

“One of the things that has changed over the last 20 years is that there is now more interaction between inmates and staff,” said Tim Ryan, who has run the jail systems in Alameda and Santa Clara counties and is now chief of corrections in Orange County, Fla.

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Using a model known as direct supervision, Ryan said, deputies in many places no longer sit outside a huge dorm filled with inmates, reacting only when there’s a problem, but mingle inside dorms and day rooms.

This model is used extensively in Chicago, where Cook County officials have built three new maximum-security facilities over the last 15 years, even though just 30% of their population is high-risk.

Under a court order to ease crowding, the jail system there can hold about 3,500 maximum-security inmates in cells that are designed for two people but that occasionally contain more. The cells are arranged around day rooms, where up to 50 inmates eat meals, watch television and make phone calls.

In New York City, at least 45% of available jail beds are in cells that can be locked down. Los Angeles County has continued to use the dorm-style facilities on the Pitchess property because it would be impractical to shut them down. Baca’s department has about 8,300 sworn deputies for jail duty, street patrols and other needs, though he has a budget for 9,300. The shortfall has affected deployment across the board.

The county Board of Supervisors allocated $70 million last year to help add staff at the jails, money that came after Baca’s battles in recent years over cuts to his budget, part of wider belt-tightening because county revenue ran short.

In the jails, the lack of deputies has contributed to the decision not to use the state-of-the-art Twin Towers to house high-security inmates, even though it was specifically designed for that purpose. Completed in the late 1990s, the 4,000-plus capacity jail instead has housed women and mental patients, who do not require as much supervision.

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Another facility renovated to accommodate maximum-security offenders was essentially shuttered in 2002 to save money. The 1,500 inmates at Century Regional Detention Center in Lynwood were moved to Pitchess. Sheriff’s officials said Century required too much staff to keep open. It has a maximum capacity of 2,000 inmates but as of Friday morning was housing about 200 mostly low-risk inmates in special intervention programs.

Last week, Baca announced that he would immediately move the most violent inmates at Pitchess to one- and two-man cells at Men’s Central Jail and other facilities to try to stem the violence. He also said he would finally begin moving some high-risk inmates into Twin Towers in March. Women now there will be moved to Century.

In announcing the policy shift, the sheriff acknowledged that violent male inmates should not be in the dorms.

Indeed, high numbers and scant supervision have made the dorms caldrons of pent-up emotions among the inmates and allowed them to create their own subculture in which deputies do not interfere unless there is an obvious incident, experts and sheriff’s officials say.

Throughout the 1990s, weekend brawls were common, as rival gang members or competing ethnic groups vied for power in the jail culture.

The most recent violence, which law enforcement officials believe was ordered by the Mexican Mafia state prison gang as a way to show power over African American inmates, may have been the inevitable climax of that shift.

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County Supervisor Mike Antonovich criticized the department for moving too slowly to open Twin Towers to violent male inmates.

Such a plan “ought to have been implemented years ago,” he said. “People’s lives are being endangered as we delay.”

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