Jail Officials Powerless to Prevent Riots, Board Told

Authorities are powerless to prevent rioting such as the disturbances involving 5,300 inmates at Pitchess jail last week until more deputies are hired and a new detention facility is opened downtown, top Sheriff’s Department officials said Tuesday.

“What we’re trying to do is make use of jails built 30 or 40 years ago,” said Undersheriff Jerry Harper after answering questions about the disturbances from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Harper said the county needs to open the new maximum security Twin Towers facility, with a capacity of 4,100 inmates, which has sat empty since it was completed last summer.

Asked what can be done in the event that the Sheriff’s Department fails to obtain funding, Harper responded: “Really, nothing.”

At least one supervisor was skeptical after Harper and Mark Squiers, chief of the Sheriff’s Department’s Custody Division, told the board that little can be done without more money.

“Sitting back and watching people kill each other I think is an unacceptable way of running a prison,” Supervisor Mike Antonovich said.

Sheriff’s officials say the new jail has natural advantages over the older Pitchess facility, such as two-man cells. Food, visitors and medical services would be brought to inmates, which would limit their movements.

In contrast, most inmates at the sprawling Pitchess Detention Center are housed in overcrowded dorms that contain as many as 130 people, a circumstance that sheriff’s officials said helped spur rioting last week between Latino and African American prisoners.

Opening and operating Twin Towers for a single year would cost $90 million. The county has faced a series of crippling deficits over the past several years, a funding squeeze that caused the Sheriff’s Department to close three jails.

During the past three years, Harper said the Sheriff’s Department’s budget has been cut $180 million. At the same time, he said, county jails have been housing increasingly violent offenders, in part because of the higher number in custody because of the new “three strikes” law.

Also Tuesday, in a letter to the Board of Supervisors, Sheriff Sherman Block presented new information about the jail riots, increasing the estimated number of prisoners involved in the fighting from 2,300 to 5,300.

Over a five-day period, according to Block, there were 25 separate incidents, and 123 prisoners and six deputies injured. Two of the prisoners remain hospitalized.

Block wrote that the fighting will cost the department more than $600,000 in extra pay as deputies accumulated more than 15,200 hours of overtime.

Block was circumspect about whether the department could achieve a lasting peace at the jail.

“The seriousness of this situation can not be overstated,” Block wrote. “Some inmate gang leaders have been identified and moved to more secure facilities, but we cannot underestimate their ability to have secondary leaders in place to fuel the continuation of these incidents.”

Block added: “Jail and prison gangs are composed of street gang members who are guaranteed media attention whenever their leadership wishes to make a statement.”

The Sheriff’s Department officials told the board that it would be impossible to attempt to separate prisoners by race because about 70% of the county jail system’s 18,000 inmates are housed in dorms, and known gang members are already segregated from the rest of the population.

Block confirmed that on the morning of Jan. 17, deputies at Pitchess received information that an organized riot was to take place that day.

The fighting started about 2 p.m. at the Pitchess jail’s East Facility and spread to the North Facility about 90 minutes later and the North County Correctional Facility that evening.

That same evening, there were three smaller disturbances at Men’s Central Jail that might have been related to the Pitchess battles.