Jail Segregation May Be Necessary, ACLU Office Says

Despite a history of staunch opposition to racial segregation, American Civil Liberties Union leaders said Thursday that keeping blacks and Latinos apart in Los Angeles County jails may be the only way to defuse the explosive tensions that have erupted into riots in recent weeks.

“Because of the compelling state interest of keeping prisoners free of harm, we believe it might be constitutionally permissible. We now feel that,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. Local ACLU Legal Director Paul Hoffman agreed and said the ACLU is examining the constitutional ramifications of such a policy at the request of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Although top sheriff’s officials said they are not yet seriously considering long-term segregation, they acknowledged asking Ripston, Hoffman and other ACLU officials to discuss the feasibility of enacting such a policy during a meeting Tuesday.

That meeting was arranged in response to the largest riot ever at the mammoth Peter J. Pitchess jail in Castaic, which occurred last Sunday. As many as 1,000 inmates rioted for hours, swinging homemade knives and broken broomsticks at each other.

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Eighty inmates were injured in the melee, including 24 who were taken to hospitals, authorities said.

Since then, a series of fights have broken out at court lockups throughout the county and at Pitchess, especially when sheriff’s deputies tried to re-integrate blacks and Latinos against their will. The two races have been kept mostly separate, and both warring sides have warned that more rioting will occur if they are put back together.

On Thursday, two African American inmates broke free of their handcuffs and injured six Latino and white inmates who were still shackled as a bus carried 55 prisoners to San Fernando Superior Court.

The possibility of keeping the Castaic facility segregated has weighed heavily on the minds of sheriff’s officials. They say they don’t want to resort to such a drastic measure, but they would otherwise be in the untenable position of trying to force inmates to get along when they don’t want to.

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Cmdr. Robert J. Spierer, who commands the facility, confirmed that the department did ask the ACLU to discuss the issue. But he said the department still believes that segregating the inmates would be bad policy and possibly unconstitutional. It would also be a procedural nightmare, he said, because of the sheer number of inmates--about 21,000 countywide--and the fact that so many of them need to be transported to and from the Pitchess facility to courthouses around the county every day.

In addition, Spierer said, the department has resisted calls for segregation for years, even though fights and racially motivated riots have been commonplace.

“It would basically amount to us almost throwing in the towel, and we prefer not to do that,” Spierer said. “However, if that is the only way we can protect the inmates, than we will have to consider it.

“We are not considering it seriously right now,” he added. “We were just looking at options.”

Spierer said jail officials are still trying to slowly re-integrate inmates in the North County Correctional Facility at Pitchess--the site of Sunday’s riot--by moving troublemakers to other jail wings and buildings and moving in new inmates. He said the department considers permanent segregation potentially dangerous because it would allow blacks and Latinos to devise plans to attack each other when reunited in non-segregated holding tanks and buses.

“We’d still have problems when we put them together,” he said. “It is a near-impossibility to segregate (completely), and we would increase the likelihood of violence when they are in shared facilities.”

Spierer cited Thursday morning’s bus incident as proof.

The attack occurred about 7 a.m. as the bus approached the courthouse, traveling southbound on the Golden State Freeway. A sheriff’s spokeswoman said two of the nine black inmates who were sitting in the back of the bus slipped off their handcuffs. One man began stabbing white and Latino inmates with a 6-inch sharpened nail, she said, while the other beat them with his fists.

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None of the inmates was seriously hurt, but three were treated at local hospitals for puncture wounds and lacerations and later released, said Sheriff’s Deputy Irma Becerra.

Although the ACLU has long opposed nearly all types of segregation, Ripston and Hoffman said it was the seriousness of the riot--and the chronic nature of the racial conflict--that led the powerful civil rights organization to re-examine its position.

“Most of the background on which we based past decisions comes out of the South, where black prisoners were kept from white ones, which is wrong. It is unconstitutional,” Ripston said. “But this issue is different. This one involves the safety of inmates.”

The ACLU has no authority to direct Sheriff’s Department decisions or policy. But sheriff’s officials are influenced by the group’s stands because of its successful lawsuits filed to protect the rights and safety of jail inmates.

In the late 1970s, the ACLU won a court order forcing the Sheriff’s Department to modify certain procedures, including addressing the problem of overcrowding. The ACLU was given authority under that judgment to monitor conditions at county jails and continues to inspect them and counsel sheriff’s officials on such issues as overcrowding and racial tensions.

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Segregation probably would not be needed throughout the jail system, although Ripston said the group is considering supporting such a policy at county jails other than Pitchess, including the downtown Los Angeles jail.

Spierer, the Pitchess commander, said department officials did not expect the ACLU, given its historic anti-segregation stance, to be so supportive of keeping blacks and Latinos apart.

“I was a bit surprised that they were as open to it and more willing to consider it as a possibility than we were,” he said.

Ripston said any formal policy on jail segregation would have to be considered by the ACLU’s 24-member executive committee and that she plans to test the waters with members of the panel in the near future.