Jail Officials Move Inmates After Brawl : Honor Rancho: Authorities order transfers throughout the sprawling Castaic facility after the weekend dormitory melee involving 129. Three deputies and 14 prisoners are injured.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials on Sunday transferred 89 inmates from a dormitory at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Castaic that was the scene of the latest in a series of race-related brawls at the County Jail.

Three sheriff’s deputies suffered minor injuries and 14 inmates were hurt in the Saturday night melee, which involved 129 inmates at a dormitory used to hold suspects awaiting trial, sentencing or other court appearances, authorities said. Since June, it was at least the 18th such incident at the jail five miles north of Santa Clarita.

Following the fighting, most of the inmates were transferred from the dorm in the East Facility to other parts of the sprawling, 2,800-acre jail complex, which houses about 8,000 inmates, Deputy Bill Linnemeyer said. The jail was calm Sunday, he said.

“Deputies are keeping a sharper eye out and are in greater visibility,” he said, but no extra staffing was added for what is normally the busiest day for visits from inmates’ relatives and friends.

The disturbance began about 8:45 p.m. Saturday when a black inmate and a Latino inmate began fighting over an allegedly stolen legal folder containing personal possessions, Deputy Larry Mead said. It quickly escalated into a brawl involving the entire dormitory as onlookers crowded around, then joined in.

“Once the fighting began, it divided along racial lines, Hispanic versus black,” Deputy Benita Hinojosa said.

“The fighting inmates were dispersed in 10 minutes by 72 deputies using sting ball grenades, which explode and disperse hard rubber balls.”

Sting balls caused the injuries to three sheriff’s personnel taken to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia, Hinojosa said. Treated and released were a lieutenant who received a minor facial cut, a deputy who suffered a bruised chest and another deputy who complained of hearing problems caused by the exploding grenades, she said.

Three inmates were treated at the hospital for stab wounds and released to deputies, Hinojosa said. One had a collapsed lung, another a puncture wound in the torso and the third was wounded in the leg, she said.

Another 11 inmates were treated at the jail infirmary for minor injuries, she said.

Battling inmates used sticks and sharpened objects as weapons and may have had homemade knives, deputies said. They would not say if any knives were recovered.

The investigation of the fight is ongoing, Mead said, and authorities did not know if charges will be filed against any inmates.

Other recent brawls have begun with minor quarrels over card games, sales of potato chips or use of telephones--of which there are usually only six per dorm--then escalated into melees involving most of the dorm’s inmates, with black and Latino inmates taking sides along racial lines.

Jail officials have said in the past that racial tensions at the Castaic facility have escalated since 1988, when Latinos supplanted blacks as the dominant group in county jails, prompting power struggles between the two groups for internal control of the jail. The average daily population among all the county’s jails now is about 45% Latino and 34% black.

Tensions have grown so high that inmates have said that, for example, a Latino would never think of lending a coffee cup to a black, or vice versa.

Jail officials have recently tried to reduce tension by scheduling phone use so that there won’t be many inmates fighting for a few phones. But problems persist.

Rapid turnover in the inmate population makes identification and isolation of chronic troublemakers difficult, officials say.

In addition, inmates are reluctant to discuss the incidents with deputies because they don’t want to be labeled informers.

Although television monitors tape activity in the dorms, it is often unclear how the fights begin and which people are fighting as opposed to merely crowding around the action, sheriff’s officials say.

In December, the Sheriff’s Department sought advice from state prison authorities, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission and clergy on quelling the repeated brawls and reducing racial tensions.