Wheels of Justice : Long Days, Little Headway Are Inmates’ Fare on Jail Bus Line

Since his arrest on armed robbery charges 17 months ago, Doyle Ray Jones has been awakened before dawn every few days and escorted to a series of windowless holding cells so crowded and poorly ventilated that a federal judge has likened them to “pigpens.”

From there, things get worse.

Jones, an inmate in the Men’s Central Jail who has not yet been convicted of anything, is chained to three fellow prisoners, shuffled out to a gloomy courtyard and dispatched on a tightly secured Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department bus to court. After the five-minute ride, he is locked in another cramped holding cell, where he waits for hours to be called before a judge.

Unless his case is heard quickly enough for him to return on the early afternoon bus, it may be 8 or 9 p.m. before Jones, 45, is back in his own cell.

What is the result of such 15-hour days?

Usually, next to nothing.

20-Minute Appearances

Until Jones’ trial finally began this month, most of his court appearances lasted no more than 10 or 20 minutes--just long enough for the judge to deny bail or continue his case.

Jones’ story is hardly unusual. The inmate, who is a plaintiff in a jail overcrowding lawsuit, is one of more than 2,000 county prisoners bused each morning for courtroom appearances, only a handful of which are trials.

The jail busing system, known as the daily “courtline,” is the largest of its kind in the nation. The sheriff’s fleet of 61 metal-barred, black-and-white buses, which fan out from the central jail to 40 courthouses from Pomona to Malibu, San Pedro to Lancaster, carry more passengers a day from downtown Los Angeles than Greyhound.

Most experts agree that given the dizzying logistics, the $10-million-a-year, 24-hour-a-day forced busing program functions remarkably smoothly. Yet most also acknowledge that rarely in the annals of county government can one find a program that accomplishes so little while functioning so well.

“They go out there and back they come . . . and only about 10% of them actually (are on) trial,” said a frustrated U.S. District Judge William P. Gray while presiding over an April hearing on jail overcrowding. “There has got to be some better way of working out a system in which the mountain comes to Mohammed.

“I can’t believe the technology has not gone far enough to permit a judge in Lancaster or Santa Monica or Pomona to be able to sit in his chamber to confront the prisoner in County Jail over television and decide these (pretrial) matters without having to travel.”

Gray, during the last 12 years, has made several major rulings on County Jail overcrowding lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

As a result of those orders, Sheriff Sherman Block last year began releasing thousands of inmates accused or convicted of misdemeanors to keep the jail population from exceeding 22,388. The county’s 10 jail facilities have a rated capacity of 13,464.

Gray, who has compared conditions in the 14-foot courtline holding cells to “the Chicago stockyards” and his “uncle’s pig ranch in Lancaster,” has also repeatedly threatened to force the sheriff to give a holding cell seat to each inmate.

Two years ago, the judge announced that he would finally enforce the requirement, but subsequently voided his action at the request of the ACLU, which had used the threat to pry concessions to help reduce the time it takes to settle criminal cases.

If ever implemented, the directive would almost certainly cause massive disruptions in court schedules since there are only 753 holding cell seats at Men’s Central--and, at this point, 2,300 prisoners are bused each morning.

Over the years, government agencies have studied various alternatives, closed-circuit TV among them, to help reduce the daily bus load, but have been stymied by financial and legal obstacles.

In the meantime, the number of prisoners bused continues at a dizzying pace. Last Nov. 28, a one-day, one-way record of 3,442 was set. For the year, sheriff’s vehicles carried prisoners on 1.79 million trips. Officials estimate that fewer than 10% of the prisoners bused to court are actually on trial.

“The RTD of the criminal courts,” as Gray recently termed it, begins its daily cycle shortly after midnight, when the county’s computer center in Downey prints out a list of inmates due in court. By 2 a.m., a deputy at Men’s Central has begun dividing the list into busloads for each courthouse.

The procedure is complicated by the fact that many prisoners require special handling. For example, members of rival street gangs must be kept apart. So must informants, women and those deemed especially violent. In addition to general seating for about 40, each bus contains three locked compartments, commonly referred to as “cages,” to house the special prisoners.

The staging ground for the daily courtline is a courtyard behind the Inmate Reception Center at Men’s Central. Before dawn each morning, several hundred prisoners housed in outlying facilities are bused downtown to be transported to courthouses throughout the county.

Wake-up time for some of these prisoners can be as early as 4 a.m., even though they will not reach the courtroom, in some instances, until nine or 10 hours later. At Men’s Central, court-bound prisoners are awakened between 5 and 6 a.m., before being led downstairs.

With far too few seats in the cinder-block cells, many prisoners are forced to stand; others lie on the floor in fetal position trying to catch an extra hour of sleep. Due to the lack of windows, a funky odor permeates the area.

“Dehumanizing? Certainly,” Jones said in a jailhouse interview. “People are smoking, there are wall-to-wall people. . . . In the holding cells it’s like putting a hundred people into a walk-in closet.”

‘Hooked’ Together

Before the prisoners are led out to the buses, they are “hooked” together, four to a chain. Two armed deputies, one serving as the driver, ride on each bus.

Although there have been only a handful of escapes, and sheriff’s officials go out of their way to praise the general prison population for its cooperation, security, understandably, is a major concern.

“Nobody gets on the bus without being handcuffed--nobody,” said veteran Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Glennon, who trains new drivers.

On the buses, some of the jumpsuit-clad prisoners sit sullenly. Others yell out the window at nearby motorists. As freeway traffic intensifies, trips to outlying courts have become increasingly drawn out.

While Sheriff’s Department officials would like to see the daily courtline lightened, some note that the bus ride itself can be a break for inmates confined for long spells behind bleak jail walls.

‘Very Long Day’

“For some of them it’s a very long day, but on the other hand, they don’t have anything else to do,” said Capt. Jerry L. West, commander of the Sheriff’s Transportation Bureau.

Inmate Wendell Meeks, who has awaited trial on murder charges since last July, says there are two sides to that story.

“The little bit of sun you get . . . for the long period of sitting and waiting and a minute in court and coming back to this (jail) . . . it’s not even worth it,” he said.

Meeks and Jones are among eight plaintiffs in a current ACLU lawsuit that accuses the county’s Superior Court judges of infringing on prisoners’ rights to a speedy trial by granting excessive continuances.

ACLU Contention

The ACLU contends that judges and others use the courtline as “a means of forcing in-custody detainees into either pleading guilty or enduring excessive continuances and jail confinement prior to trial.”

The ACLU also maintains that some prisoners, after taking the long bus ride, are not even brought inside the courtroom when minor actions are taken in their cases. ACLU attorney John Hagar says the daily courtline would decrease significantly if judges disposed of criminal cases more expeditiously.

But Presiding Judge Richard P. Byrne, who contends that judges are doing everything within their power to speed up court proceedings, said the courtline “is a very, very complex system involving many, many people far-flung geographically. It’s not capable of an easy panacea.”

Some experts contend that much of the burden for the courtline has to be placed on defendants and their lawyers, since many continuances are sought by defense attorneys who either have too many cases to try or believe that their clients’ chances will be enhanced as the memories of witnesses fade.

35 Appearances

In the case of Jones, who had 35 court appearances before finally going on trial on charges stemming from the armed robberies of five restaurants and a supermarket, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Grosbard points out that almost all the continuances were sought by the defense.

Jones, who says he wanted his trial to begin a year ago, maintains that many of the delays are the result of stalling by the district attorney’s office in turning over necessary evidence.

“If you are being held in jail, you don’t want continuances,” the Pasadena resident said. “You want to get out.”

Gray, at an April hearing, indefinitely stayed the ACLU’s lawsuit, advising Hagar to first seek a ruling in state court.

But the federal judge warned that he may eventually be forced to alter the busing system.

“Maybe somehow, with the help of the Superior Court and county counsel and ACLU and my participation to the extent as appropriate, another attempt can be made to stop this intolerable process that these fellows have to be taken to all these outlying areas for no purpose other than to consider a continuance or motions of some kind,” Gray said. “The time may come when this court will have to consider the constitutional issues that are involved.”