Black Inmates’ Suit Blames Sheriff for Riots at Pitchess

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

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

Latino inmates outnumber African Americans, and most of the 30 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, alleges that authorities knew blacks were going to 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,” contends the 15-page lawsuit.

Sheriff’s officials declined to comment Wednesday, saying that they had not seen the lawsuit. In the past, officials have said that they learned of riot plans only minutes before inmates began attacking each other. Officials also have said that 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 contends, however, that black inmates often are 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 blacks.

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

Corrections experts said the Pitchess lawsuit is 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 Prison Project. “We’ve had class-action discrimination suits based on race, but nothing like this.”

Fathi said he was alarmed by the sheriff’s response so far to the jail riots: racial segregation. After three days of back-to-back riots involving hundreds of inmates, jail authorities took the unusual step of dividing inmates by race and placing black and Latino inmates in separate dorms.

“It sounds like a system totally out of control,” said Fathi. “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 at the Pitchess compound in which several Latino inmates trashed their dorms and battled authorities who tried to relocate them from a Latino-only dorm to one with African Americans. There also were 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.”

Over the past nine years, there have been more than 150 race riots at Pitchess, authorities have said.