A Jail Ritual: Long Lines, Brief Visits

They gather each evening beneath the gray granite columns of the Los Angeles County Hall of Justice, about 150 people waiting an hour in the brisk winter air.

There are wives for whom the visits are a nightly pilgrimage, fathers who wonder why their sons went wrong and teen-agers who come to chat with a neighborhood friend. Once they pass the security check, the visitors will be allowed a 20-minute conversation with one of the 1,800 male inmates who are held in the building’s jail.

The line of visitors outside the Hall of Justice Jail has become a permanent fixture in the downtown Los Angeles Civic Center. For as long anyone at the 60-year-old jail can remember, the line has snaked along the sidewalk near the corner of Broadway and Temple Street.

“I try to cheer him up as much as possible. I tell him about things that are going on outside,” said Sonny, whose 22-year-old son has spent 19 months in the facility awaiting trial on drug charges. Like many of those in line, Sonny visits the jail almost every night.

Sonny, a dignified 50-year-old with penetrating brown eyes, casts a sorrowful glance at the passing rush-hour traffic on Temple Street as he speaks of his son.

“Everyone is telling you, ‘It’s the Christmas holidays, be happy.’ But you can’t,” he said. “It’s like him dying for a few months. Unless you live it, you can’t imagine how it is.”

In all, about 1,200 people visit the jail each day, forming lines on the hour from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weeknights. There are so many visitors that the footsteps of countless children playing as they wait to see their jailed fathers has eroded half of the building’s front lawn into a patch of dirt. And the visitors say large rats occasionally feed on the trash left on the sidewalk by the daily crowds.

Still, the crush of humanity has created a certain camaraderie among the people in the line. Mostly women, they are a cross section of Los Angeles society--immigrant housekeepers, secretaries and, on one night, a 45-year-old real estate broker from Beverly Hills. She had come to visit someone who was jailed for a parole violation.

“I’ve made one very close friend here,” said the real estate broker, who gave only her first name, Carmie. Her new friend is the owner of a dress shop. Carmie said the two women became close when they noticed they were the only people in line wearing business clothes.

“We meet in line once a week and we have dinner afterwards,” she said.

Carmie said there is one unspoken rule among the regulars in line: “You never ask what your guy is in for.”

Most of the inmates of the maximum-security facility are men and juveniles awaiting trial in the Criminal Courts building across the street. Some have been convicted of less-serious crimes such as burglary that do not require incarceration in state prison, said Deputy Fidel Gonzales of the Sheriff’s Information Bureau.

The line forms outside because, unlike other county facilities, the 1920s-era jail was built without an indoor waiting room. Only on the coldest nights and during rainstorms are the visitors allowed to escape the elements and wait in the building’s marble-lined lobby.

Even in the winter, the visitors in line don’t complain about the weather as much as they do about what they call the crowded and inhuman conditions suffered by their loved ones inside the facility.

“They feed birds better than they feed these people,” Sonny said.

On the other hand, one young woman in line didn’t think it mattered much if the men inside were fed well or not.

“If they did do something wrong, they should be punished,” said Twila Etherly, 19, of San Pedro. Etherly had come to visit a friend charged with “attempted murder, burglary . . . a little bit of everything it seems like.”

“He’s all right,” Etherly said of her jailed friend. “He says they mainly just sit around, watching TV, getting tattoos, writing letters.”

Meanwhile, the deputies running the jail have their own problems--such as trying to stop the inmates and visitors from smuggling in drugs.

Lt. Bill Graves, in charge of the jail, said his deputies are on constant lookout for fish lines dropping down the side of the building. With the help of some unscrupulous visitors, the inmates use the lines to pull up small bags of drugs to their cell windows, 11 or 12 stories above the street.

Although the visitors are not allowed to bring gifts to the inmates, they can give them cash, which the prisoners can use to buy candy, cigarettes and toiletries in the jail’s store. But even the money itself can be used to sneak drugs to the prisoners, Graves said.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, when psychedelic drugs were popular, visitors placed drops of LSD on dollar bills for easy consumption by inmates, Graves said. Now, all bills passed to inmates are soaked in water.

Visitors also may give the guards coins to pass on to their loved ones. But when a few visitors found a way to smuggle cocaine inside quarters, the sheriff’s department ruled that only dimes would be allowed to pass, Graves said.

Some visitors then appeared with rolls of dimes, but soon deputies began breaking up the rolls to find that the coins were sometimes stuck together with tar heroin.

All visitors to the jail are required to present identification to the deputies. The names are run through a computer check designed to detect former inmates and those convicted of serious crimes, Graves said.

With predictable frequency--about twice a week--the deputies arrest someone in the visitors’ line on an outstanding warrant, hauling the fugitive away to a cell in a jail they thought they were only visiting.

Most of the visitors, however, pass the security check without incident. After waiting a few minutes in the building’s first-floor lobby, they pack into one of two freight elevators for the ride to the 12th-floor visiting room.

Visitors and inmates are allowed no physical contact. The visitors speak through one of 78 telephones to an inmate they can see through a pane of thick bullet-proof glass.

The men are dressed in jail-blue overalls, with the words “Los Angeles County Jail” written across the back. A few seem disconsolate, wiping tears from their cheeks as they hold the telephone receivers. But others smile and wave at their children when they gather around the visiting booths.

Walking down the row of booths, one hears fragments of the sometimes emotional, sometimes mundane conversations between mothers and their sons, wives and their husbands.

“How you been?” an elderly woman asks.

“No, I didn’t talk to Claudia,” a woman says in Spanish. “I was going to talk to her yesterday.”

“What? It’s cold in there?” another man asks, raising his voice to be heard through a bad phone connection.

When the allotted 20 minutes is up, the connection is cut, leaving inmates and visitors to say their goodbys with hand signals.

At booth No. 41, a woman wearing a long brown coat and muffler hangs up the telephone receiver and heads for the elevator. Later, she said her husband has served two months in the jail on drunk driving charges and on outstanding warrants.

“Basically, he’s in there for being a fool,” said the 28-year-old woman from Long Beach, who asked not to be identified.

Since her husband’s arrest, she has been alone with her three children, the oldest of whom is 3. She is unemployed, and making ends meet is difficult, but that isn’t the worst part of her husband’s captivity.

“It’s hard to explain to your kids where dad is,” she said.