Jail Security an Oxymoron

Twenty-three-year-old Santiago Pineda allegedly was able to sneak out of his cell in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail last month and strangle another inmate partly because, county officials said, he possessed the diabolical mind and skills of a Hannibal Lecter. However, Pineda’s success in allegedly finding and killing Raul Tinajero -- who testified last month that he saw Pineda drive his car over another man last year -- illustrates profound problems in the county jail system, from lax rules and inadequate guard training to archaic inmate tracking systems.

These systemic problems pose chronic threats to public safety that cry out for a public inquiry more serious than the one Wednesday in which county supervisors did little more than vent their deep “outrage” to Sheriff Lee Baca. What’s needed is less hysteria and a more honest examination of the underlying problems that allowed this and other jailhouse killings to happen.

Merrick Bobb, a special counsel who monitors the jails for the Board of Supervisors, says his office is now investigating several other recent cases in which inmates attacked other inmates after being allowed to wander from their cells. In one such incident, described in The Times today by staff writer Anna Gorman, Shane Wilson was attacked with a razor in his cell by a man who authorities believe was sent by the Mexican Mafia.

The county’s jailhouse rules themselves, while perhaps toothy enough to control check-kiters, drunks and other petty criminals, are unfit for managing the violent, gang-affiliated inmates that crowd L.A. jails today.

Even if good rules were in place, the county wouldn’t be able to enforce them without well-trained guards and state-of-the-art inmate classification systems. It has neither. As Bobb warned in a report released last fall, Baca’s deputies frequently begin work in the jails before receiving any formal training, leaving them unable to control violent inmates. The county’s inmate tracking system also is a joke among criminal justice experts: A paper-based system that hasn’t been updated for decades, it may help explain why Pineda was able to promenade through the jail using another inmate’s identification papers.

Baca has made any number of excuses for failing, as Supervisor Gloria Molina said Wednesday, to publicly disclose “the full truth” about county jail violence. He snapped to Molina that “I’m only a phone call away.” And he has argued that baring his department’s failures could expose the county, and therefore its taxpayers, to litigation.

The sheriff’s defensiveness and the supervisors’ tendency to grandstand rather than brainstorm are failures of leadership. They will, justifiably, undermine support for the ballot measure that Baca is promoting to raise the county’s sales tax by half a cent to fund law enforcement.

Baca runs the world’s largest local jail system. The 18,000 inmates in his charge at any one time dwarf the 6,900 inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island, and laws require him to allow thousands to meet outside their cells with doctors, social workers, lawyers, relatives and others. Screw-ups are inevitable.

None of that, however, justifies the appalling lapses in basic security that allegedly allowed Pineda to wander unsupervised through the jail until he found Tinajero and killed him without a shred of interference.