Officials to Seek Outside Advice to Contain Racial Violence at Jail

Continued racial strife at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic signals that Los Angeles County Jail authorities have not calmed the power struggle between black and Latino inmates there, incarceration experts said Tuesday.

Assistant Sheriff Richard Foreman praised recent efforts by Pitchess officials to stem the violence but said the department would now turn to the state prison system and the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission for advice.

“We have basically a cop focus on this, and maybe we need to get another point of view,” Foreman said.

Fights Saturday and Monday involved entire jail dormitories--more than 200 inmates in all--and sent several inmates to hospitals with minor wounds from homemade weapons. That raised to 10 the number of race-related outbreaks scattered among the four Pitchess jail facilities since June.

Experts around the state--from both within and outside the penal system--said that if the underlying animosities are not resolved, the violence will continue and probably escalate. They said such conflicts are particularly hard to conquer in dormitory-style accommodations such as those prevalent at Pitchess.

“You just can’t monitor the kind of mass conflict that can take place, and you can’t protect people in that environment,” said Craig Haney, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz who has written extensively about prison conditions.

All 10 of the fights at Pitchess began as seemingly minor squabbles between two inmates, sometimes over money, a card game or the use of telephones. But the disputes quickly took on racial overtones and fighting spread.

County Jail officials originally denied race was a major factor in the melees but in September said that the recurring violence resulted from a shift in the jail population from a black to a Latino majority. They said that change, which occurred in mid-1988, left the two racial groups fighting for internal control of the jail.

Foreman also noted that the rapid turnover of inmates in the County Jail makes it difficult to identify chronic troublemakers and separate them from the jail population.

Opinions vary widely among prison experts on what should be done to quell the violence.

Some suggested increased vigilance and control by jail guards, while others said more exercise and classes for inmates would relieve tensions caused by spending too much idle time together in the dormitories. A few recommended segregating activities, such as phone use, by race, although most said that would not only be unconstitutional but also ineffective.

“It might solve the problem temporarily, but later within the race you’d have people trying to take control . . . you’d have gangs against gangs,” said Paul W. Comiskey, an attorney with the Prisoners Rights Union, a Sacramento-based inmate advocacy organization.

In September, County Jail officials said they were taking steps to solve the problem, ranging from more contact between correctional officers and inmates to stronger punishment for the perpetrators. Because control of a bank of telephones had been the catalyst for at least three of the earlier fights, and again for Saturday’s, a bunk-by-bunk telephone schedule was devised, said David Hagthrop, commander of the East Facility where the most recent fights occurred.

“We’re looking at the problem and we’re trying to solve it, but it’s an unsolvable problem,” Hagthrop said Tuesday. But he blamed the inmates, not jail management, for the continuing strife.

Hagthrop said inmates are invited to participate in activities ranging from literacy classes to jail cleanup to drug counseling sessions, although he estimated that they do spend up to 16 hours a day in the dorms.

According to the state Department of Corrections, similar racial shifts have occurred at only two of California’s state prisons: the California Institute of Men in Chino and the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi.

At the Chino prison, segregation of telephone use has been enforced for nearly a decade, said spokesman Kevin Peters, while at the Tehachapi prison a strict sign-up list and placement of many of the telephones outside the dormitories has solved the telephone battle. But Tehachapi spokesman Joe Sullivan said arguments over television programming tend to spark fights there, which often break along racial lines.