Fix Up the Jail or Wait for a Lawsuit

Recently, I paid an unannounced visit to the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

The jail holds more than 7,400 people--600 more than its mandated capacity. Most have been accused of crimes ranging from traffic offenses to serious felonies. Some have been convicted of comparatively minor offenses and are serving brief sentences. Of the arrested but not tried, some will be convicted, some will be found innocent and some will be found to have been arrested by mistake.

Mine was the first in a series of special visits by ACLU staff members over the past two weeks. However, the ACLU has been monitoring jail conditions continually since 1978 under a federal court order.

Since January of this year, conditions have taken a serious turn for the worse.

Our monitoring has revealed that epidemic overcrowding, a lack of adequate health care and the failure to provide basic necessities such as clean clothes, towels and showers have reached an intolerable level. Jail conditions are at their worst and most dangerous level in more than two decades.

I arrived at the jail on a weekday morning with a lawyer and a paralegal who serve as our regular jail monitors. I made my way through cellblocks and other places where prisoners are jammed into small spaces never intended for use as housing. A chapel had been converted to a housing unit for 176 inmates. Nearby, two dayrooms held the astonishing total of 283 men--bunks and mattresses so closely packed that they touched.

A number of mentally and physically ill individuals, including diabetics and epileptics, receive inadequate medical care and are deprived of necessary medication. The day before my visit, a man with chicken pox was placed in the crowded makeshift dormitory for many hours.

In the jail’s mental health unit, I encountered a man babbling incoherently in a cell with feces on the floor. Other men were screaming and thrashing about without adequate supervision. Some lights outside the cells were dark and others were flickering on and off, creating a weird Twilight Zone-like sensation.

In the overcrowded chapel and dayrooms, it was clear that conditions are at the tinderbox level. Members of rival gangs and other violent detainees are thrown together with persons accused of misdemeanors.

Dozens of inmates who had been ordered freed--many because they had finished serving their sentences--had not been released. The unwarranted delays, caused by bureaucratic deficiencies, compound the effects of overcrowding and enhance the potential for violence.

Entire units are denied showers for as long as 10 days and often there are no towels or soap. There also are regular shortages of toiletry kits and mattresses, forcing arrestees to sleep on concrete floors.

Last week, inmates defeated the locking mechanisms in one tier of cells so that the guards assigned to it believed wrongly that all doors were secure. The inmates then stabbed a jail trustee.

To be sure, our jails require more financial resources. We must provide adequate staffing levels and equipment. We must speed the full opening of the new, but largely unused, Twin Towers facility. But money is not the only issue. Immediate reforms must be implemented in the release system and even more immediate steps must be taken to supply the needed towels, mattresses, clothing, toilet articles and medical care.

Funds already are available for most of these purposes. What is required is assigning top priority to instituting all possible health and safety measures.

If this is not done, the only alternative is increased litigation. Defending the county against lawsuits that are virtually indefensible will result in expenditures as great or greater than the cost of improving the intolerable conditions.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which appropriates the money spent on the jails, should take a role in monitoring conditions.

Finally, judges--the men and women responsible for committing people to jail and keeping them there--should pay unannounced visits to the facilities. Perhaps such visits would encourage them to give more serious consideration to developing constructive alternatives to incarceration.

Without immediate action, the already unacceptable situation in our jails will become even worse. Surely, no one wants that.