A Note to Rage-Addicted, Tough-on-Crime Voters

Some years ago, on some assignment or another, I found myself touring the Men’s Central Jail. The particulars are dim now--the memory has devolved into a general impression of metal and concrete--but the feeling involved was vivid: Fear. The men in the jail-issue scrubs seemed hard-eyed and enormous. The deputies, in their neat brown uniforms with their belts full of apparatus, seemed outnumbered and small. At one point, we had to move past some inmates and I could feel my eyes involuntarily cast themselves downward. Only one detail stuck with me: I broke the speed limit getting out of there.

Like any normal, law-abiding civilian, I eventually blanked out the experience, but it crept back to mind when the mail came in last week. In this space, the jails had come up for discussion. There had been allegations of brutality toward mentally ill inmates. This, in turn, prompted responses from readers, some of whom also had painful memories.

“After being booked into the jail, I was held in an area that was actually a hallway but was being used as a holding cell,” wrote a Los Angeles artist who ended up in custody after failing to deal with a raft of traffic tickets. “Within minutes, fights broke out. I was in one with four inmates when one insisted that I trade my larger shirt for his smaller one. Refusing, I was beat, and for about a month had difficulty breathing because of a sharp pain from what I imagine was a broken rib. There was no guard whatsoever over this long, narrow corridor.”

Equally emotional were the notes from current and former jail deputies: “Stand in the shoes of the deputies for a few days and see what they deal with,” one wrote. “S--- throwing mental cases, blood-spitting AIDS patients, vomiting heroin users, aggressive, violent inmates that are facing the three-strikes law.” “Bad guys have no rules. We can only react,” wrote another. And there was this from a 27-year veteran: “It is my experience that, regardless of how they are treated, all inmates consider all guards their enemy.”

*

At one level, it was noteworthy that anyone had anything left to say on an issue as tangled and long-running as the management of the jails. In this tough-on-crime era, we normal, law-abiding citizens have generally preferred to blank out the nuts and bolts questions that have accompanied the enactment of our harsh rhetoric.

But the letters raised some good points that should be of interest in this election year. They go out to anyone who, like this citizen, is beginning to wonder whether we’re setting our criminal justice employees up to fail.

A number of readers asked, for instance: Why are the jails full of mental patients? And if we’re not going to do anything to improve mental health care, why aren’t deputies being trained to deal with them? On any given day, jail officials estimate, there are more than 1,500 mentally ill people in the county lockup. A 1996 study estimated that the state spends $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion a year to catch, adjudicate and incarcerate people with psychiatric problems, in the misbegotten notion that you can punish the demons out of someone who’s mentally ill.

Some mental health advocates, noting that the sick people who refuse treatment are usually the ones who end up behind bars, blamed laws that make it hard to commit a mental patient involuntarily. Others blamed HMOs and the paucity of reliable, affordable mental health care. All noted that the county provides next to no special preparation on the control of the mentally ill for jail deputies.

The upshot has been a buildup of psychiatric patients in an institution staffed by people who thought their job was to control criminals. Most deputies, while appalled, were not entirely surprised that when officials discovered a “posse” of vigilante deputies allegedly beating inmates they saw as “coddled,” the problem turned out to be concentrated in the mental wards.

*

There were other questions, too: Why don’t deputies know more about the backgrounds of individual inmates? Why are, say, artists who don’t pay their traffic tickets thrown in with three-strike felons and hardened criminals? Fear stems from ignorance. Wouldn’t better information curb that fear?

And fear there remains. For both captives and captors, we have turned yesterday’s drunk tank into today’s house of hate. “There is a siege mentality at the jail,” wrote a retired public defender. And he blamed us, the rage-addicted, tough-on-crime voters. Blank it out all you want: He has a point.

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