Harsh Report on Long Beach Jail Disputed

Most of the cell bars in this place are minty green. But the Long Beach City Jail is hardly minty clean.

Dirty? By all means. Dank smelling showers? Indeed. Resident cockroaches? Absolutely.

“It is what it is -- a jail,” said Deputy Police Chief Tim Jackman, leading yet another tour of the jail in downtown Long Beach.

It also is a 1959-era, six-story building undergoing a $40-million overhaul because of asbestos, lead paint and age -- a point not mentioned in a scathing report recently by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury, which made two inspections last fall.

That omission and the assertion that rats were found skittering around in daylight -- which the city health department never found in monthly visits -- has perplexed and exasperated jail commanders.

And for jurors to never mention the overhaul yet clobber the Long Beach Police Department as “irresponsible” for failing to maintain the jail -- even for jeopardizing the health and welfare of inmates and staff --is unfair, they say. “It’s not the Hilton,” said police jail Cmdr. Jeffry Johnson. “But I spend 10 hours a day here, [as does] the staff, which is here 24/7, and nobody has seen rats.... Is it clean? No. Is it filthy? No.”

Yet that is the precise word used by the grand jury, which issued its annual report last month outlining its findings on a wide range of issues it addressed during its yearlong service.

The state penal code mandates the civilian jury, composed of 23 citizens who serve a term that ends with the fiscal year, to make annual inspections of all city jails, detention centers and court holding cells.

Los Angeles County has 88 cities, some that run their own jails and some that assign the work to private firms or the county Sheriff’s Department, which polices the 2,299 square miles of unincorporated land.

The grand jury’s report concluded that most jails inspected were meeting minimum standards, but described the Long Beach jail as “in the worst condition of all the facilities visited by the grand jury.”

Noting that they bring no special expertise to the inspection of jails and lockups, the jurors said they used state corrections board guidelines on health and safety, such as access to fire extinguishers and oxygen masks and overall sanitation and appearance.

The report said the Long Beach jail “had roaches and rodents scampering across the floors. All of this was brought to the attention of management. A second surprise visit found that nothing had changed.”

Any further explanation of the report or clarifying the jurors’ observations is not an option. The grand jury cannot be questioned after it issues a final report, said Deputy County Counsel Gordon Trask, one of the jury’s legal advisors. A new grand jury already has been seated for the new fiscal year.

Unlike a criminal grand jury, which has the power to issue criminal indictments, the civil grand jury is an advisory body with no enforcement power.

The building that houses the jail was the Police Department headquarters until March 2002, when it relocated to a former utility company site nearby.

The jail can house 250 inmates, most of whom spend no more than 72 hours there before court appearances, and with upgrades, ranging from central air-conditioning to plumbing, will accommodate 900 police employees. Should anyone doubt the need for the plumbing work, human waste burst once from a collapsed pipe onto a desk before the move, said Sgt. Paul LeBaron. “In the perfect world, we would move everybody out” of the building, said Johnson, the jail commander. “We had to keep the jail in that building for financial reasons.”

To move the city jail would have cost tens of millions or more, said Del Davis, manager of the building’s rehabilitation for the city Public Works department, because it would have to meet current standards that are considerably more demanding than 43 years ago. “It’s costing $600,000 just to replace the mechanisms to open and close the [cell] doors,” Johnson said.

As to endangering the health or safety of inmates or police employees, two other agencies that inspected the jail last year found otherwise. “I did the inspection and did not find rats or rat droppings,” Allison Ganter of the state Board of Corrections said of her March 2002 visit to check inmate housing and program areas.

Dr. Darryl Sexton, director of the Long Beach Health and Human Services Department, said his agency conducted monthly inspections of the jail last year and found no evidence of rodents. His inspectors pay particular attention to the kitchen area, where vermin most likely would be found. “We had no cases of food poisoning, or inmates getting sick, and one of the things that can happen with exposure to cockroaches is it can trigger asthma, and there was none of that,” Sexton said.

In a city facing a $97-million budget shortfall over the next three years unless it makes severe cuts, the jail critique stung, but remedies beyond the present plan to finish its rehabilitation seem unlikely. “It sounds like we have ignored the situation, when, in fact, we have been planning on these repairs for years and are in the process of making them,” Davis said. The renovation is to be completed in 2005.