When Inmates Prey on the Asylums

California politics are big on outrage. Outrage gets the votes out, loosens the pocketbooks. In a place this unwieldy, you could argue that hot buttons and bogeymen serve a purpose. Still, governance by outrage has a price, and it stinks when you get burned with the bill.

The latest case in point is festering, even as you read this, at a jail or mental hospital near you. It was spawned a few years back by an especially effective form of outrage, that of crime victims. The child Polly Klaas had been murdered. The Pillowcase Rapist, attacker of scores of women, was being freed.

From the candlelight vigils, the terrified cry arose: Lock up the monsters. Throw away the key. Swiftly, as you may recall, prison time was hiked for “sexually violent predators,” as rapists and child molesters now were known. Only one problem: The new law couldn’t apply retroactively to monsters already in prison. So it was decreed that when a monster gets paroled, the state could declare him mentally disordered and lock him up some more.

Out of the jailhouse and into the nuthouse. Shades of the Cuckoo’s Nest and double jeopardy notwithstanding, the crowd went wild. Two local politicians carried it through the Legislature, and one rode that baby straight to Congress. Gov. Pete Wilson happily signed it into law.

End of story. Fast forward to the present. Sexually violent predators are yesterday’s news. But in the jails and mental hospitals, which--like the prisons--voters don’t think about until someone inside gets injured and sues them, it’s a different story. Call it Sexually Violent Predator II.

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“Theater of the absurd.” Judge Harold E. Shabo is shaking his frizzy head, his robe flapping as he strides disgustedly into his chambers in Department 95 of the Los Angeles Superior Court. His courtroom specializes in cases involving mental patients; in a harsh system, it has been a gentle place.

No more. On this morning, three defendants have come before Judge Shabo, and two have been ex-cons whose rap sheets marked them as predators. In a place normally populated by psychotics, these guys don’t seem crazy, but both are awaiting hearings to determine whether they should be locked up in a mental hospital.

They are two among hundreds, and for two years now, their ranks have been stacking up in our last remaining mental institutions and our overcrowded jails. Under the law, once an inmate gets out, he now is screened by the state Department of Mental Health and the district attorney to see whether he qualifies as an “SVP,” in the parlance. If so, there’s a hearing to see whether there is probable cause to hold him. Then there’s a trial, after which he can be committed to Atascadero State Hospital for two years.

But the hearings and trials are taking longer than anyone expected, and in the interim, there’s the tricky problem of where these guys should wait. Put them in jail, Shabo says, and other inmates brutalize them; child molesters and rapists are at the bottom of the food chain there. Send them to Atascadero (at $107,000 a year each), and they pick on the mental patients, work the system, hit the staff.

Already, officials say, the brutal ethos of the penitentiary (see this week’s disturbing Times report on Corcoran State Prison) has infected the hospital: One SVP has had his parole revoked for attacking a hospital staffer, and advocates report that SVPs are exploiting sicker patients for sex. Meanwhile, SVP complaints to the patient’s rights advocate at Atascadero are piled eight inches deep. One predator groused that he couldn’t develop normal sexual desires because there were too few good-looking nurses; others petitioned for special treatment, charging piquantly “we’re not dings.”

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Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles County Jail, where the problem has been acute, the trick has been to put them where they won’t get murdered, as an alleged child molester was recently. The solution has been to house them in the old, vermin-infested suicide watch module, deemed barely habitable by the U.S. Justice Department last year.

Which would probably be only marginally compelling were it not for the new prey of the predators--the people they’re being housed with and those footing the bill. Quietly and slowly, an expensive and awful thing has been happening: As our jails have filled up with mentally ill people, our last few mental hospitals have begun to be overtaken with criminals.

You can ask what it means that we are willing to throw suffering people in with “monsters,” and you’ll no doubt find answers galore. But one thing’s certain: It won’t be long before someone gets injured or worse. Brace for the lawsuits, Mr. and Ms. Taxpayer. Feel the burn.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com