Officials Had Early Warning of Jail Violence

In the wake of three days of fighting by thousands of prisoners at the Pitchess jail that has left 166 injured, a high-ranking sheriff’s official said Friday the department knew well in advance that inmates planned a mass outbreak of violence and was ready for it.

Despite the many injuries, the preemptive mobilization prevented a far worse outcome, said Mark Squiers, chief of the Sheriff’s Department’s Custody Division.

Squiers also said he believes that the fighting between African American and Latino inmates may be the result of a power struggle within the ranks of the Mexican Mafia, a powerful gang based in the state prison system.

When the fighting at the Pitchess Detention Center--plagued by frequent racial brawls for a decade--erupted simultaneously throughout the facility at 2 p.m. Wednesday, the department had extra deputies on hand and an emergency command post already set up, Squiers said in an interview.

“Sources came to us about an impending problem . . . the word had spread to the point that we knew down to the time it was to happen,” Squiers said. “We were in fact mobilized when it occurred.

“The damage and the injuries were limited to far less than what it could have been,” Squiers said. “We have to be extremely proud of the reaction of the deputies for containing the violence.”

About 500 deputies were on duty at the jail this week combating the violence. But the Sheriff’s Department has declined to say how many guards are usually stationed there and how many were reinforcements, saying it does not want prisoners to know the number of guards, a spokesman said.

But the Sheriff’s Department has been at a loss to bring an end to the fighting, which continued Friday, with six more injuries reported. So far sheriff’s officials estimate more than 2,300 inmates have been involved in 16 melees.

“The magnitude and the seriousness of this is enormous,” Squiers said.

He said that contrary to previous statements by sheriff’s deputies, he believes the fighting is not being fueled solely by racial tensions between African American and Latino inmates, the cause of scores of brawls in recent years.

“What this is about is state prison gangs and the assertion of power,” Squiers said, voicing suspicions that the violence is the result of a power struggle between members of the Mexican Mafia trying to fill a void created by the indictment of 23 of its key leaders last spring in federal court.

“This whole conflict, in my estimation, is orchestrated and is in all likelihood attributable to a Hispanic prison gang and a series of orders instructing inmates to act in the way they have.”

He did not explain why attacks on black prisoners would affect a power struggle within the Latino gang.

African American prisoners, outnumbered 45% to 35% by Latinos, have suffered about 75% of the injuries in the fighting, deputies have said.

“We know there is a gang influence,” Squiers said. “But we don’t know who these people are, only that there are many of them.”

An estimated 40% to 50% of the county jail inmate population is believed to belong to street gangs, he said.

Also, contrary to a statement by the department Wednesday, Squiers said some inmates have been temporarily segregated by race. “Some dormitories are all black or all Latino,” he said. “We don’t have enough room to do it completely.”

A department spokesman had said Wednesday that racial segregation of the prisoners was philosophically undesirable, too difficult to maintain and ineffective. Groups segregated in the past simply fought among themselves, he said.

With no long-term solutions in sight, sheriff’s deputies have been forced to react to the violence, rather than control it, Squiers said.

“I’m not saying there’s no solution,” Squiers said. “But I’m not confident when you have a prison gang calling the shots that there is a great deal you can do other than to react.”

Originally built to house misdemeanor and low level felony offenders, the Pitchess jail has undergone dramatic changes in recent years due to budget cuts and the three strikes law.

Since the 1992-93 fiscal year, the Sheriff’s Department has lost hundreds of employees due to a shrinking budget and has closed four jails. At the same time, the three strikes law has taxed the jail system, with inmates more inclined to go to trial to fight charges rather than plea bargain with prosecutors and accept a conviction that becomes a “strike.”

The misdemeanor inmates that Pitchess was originally designed to house are usually cited and released, leading to a concentration of violent offenders living in a jail that was not designed to house them.

Unlike the small cells at traditional jails, many Pitchess inmates live in 125-man dormitories designed when the jail was a dairy farm, worked by minimum security prisoners.

One solution, sheriff’s officials and civil libertarians say, is to open the newly completed Twin Towers jail in Downtown Los Angeles. Designed to house maximum security inmates, the jail is empty because Sheriff Sherman Block says he has no money to operate it.

Silvia Argueta, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Twin Towers is geared to house serious offenders because it is designed so that visitors, food and medical services are brought to the inmates rather than requiring that large numbers of inmates move about the jail. The design limits the movements of the inmates and the problems that arise when they are allowed to congregate in larger dorms such as those at Pitchess, she said.

Argueta said she plans to tour Pitchess next week to inspect the conditions and will also hold discussions with sheriff’s officials.