Black Inmates Sue Sheriff Over Pitchess Riots

Black inmates at the Pitchess Detention Center are suing the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, claiming jail officials violated their civil rights by allowing race riots to continue year after year.

According to the class-action suit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, sheriff’s deputies subjected black inmates to life-threatening situations by not ensuring the dorms at Pitchess were racially balanced and failing to search for weapons.

Latino inmates outnumber African Americans, and most of the 80 men injured in the latest round of race riots were black, authorities have said. Several were stabbed with homemade knives and one 21-year-old black inmate was beaten so badly he remains in a coma.

The suit, filed by Marina del Rey attorney Leon Jenkins on behalf of 273 inmates, also alleges that authorities knew blacks would be attacked and did nothing to stop it.

“[The] Sheriff’s Department knew weeks, days and hours before the riots that they were about to happen and intentionally fostered a heightened atmosphere of tension within the Hispanic population and isolated very small numbers of African Americans within a hostile Hispanic population,” claims the 15-page lawsuit.

Sheriff officials declined to comment Wednesday, saying they had not seen the lawsuit. Officials have previously said they learned of riot plans only minutes before inmates began attacking each other. Officials have also said they can’t always racially balance the dorms because Latino inmates outnumber blacks 2 to 1 in the north county jails near Castaic.

The suit claims, however, that black inmates are often outnumbered 4 to 1 and 8 to 1 by Latinos and asks why authorities designate special dorms for Asian Americans but resist permanently setting aside dorms for African Americans.

The Asian American jail population is small enough to accommodate in one dorm, Sheriff’s Cmdr. Steve Day said in an earlier interview. But authorities don’t have the resources to separately house the much larger black inmate population, Day said.

Corrections experts say the Pitchess lawsuit is very unusual.

“I’m not aware of any case where prisoners of one race claim they are being victimized by those of another race,” said David Fathi, staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Prison Project. “We’ve had class-action discrimination suits based on race, but nothing like this.”

Fathi also said he was alarmed by the sheriff’s response so far to the jail riots: racial segregation. After three continuous days of riots involving hundreds of inmates, jail authorities took the unusual step of placing black and Latino inmates in separate dorms. Over the past nine years, there have been more than 150 race riots at Pitchess, authorities have said.

“It sounds like a system totally out of control,” said Fathi, who has filed several suits nationwide on behalf of prisoners. “And if the only way they can maintain control is to segregate--which is unconstitutional--then that’s a startling confession.”

But authorities have learned this week that desegregation is not easy, either.

On Monday, there were two disturbances on the Pitchess compound in which several Latino inmates trashed their dorms and battled deputies who tried to relocate the inmates from a Latino-only dorm into one with African Americans. There were also race-inflamed disturbances at the Men’s Central Jail on Tuesday.

Jenkins, who specializes in police abuse cases, said the Sheriff’s Department has shown “a total indifference to the plight of the African American inmates in their custody.”

“These riots have happened year after year,” Jenkins said. “And if you don’t take corrective action it shows a deliberate indifference to the rights of these inmates.”