Sheriff to Move Violent Inmates

As deputies struggled to bring calm to the Los Angeles County jail system, sheriff’s officials said Tuesday that they would begin next month to move thousands of the most violent inmates out of the general population and into the Twin Towers Jail.

The decision marks a major shift in the way the Sheriff’s Department houses inmates and comes after years of criticism that the county was underutilizing Twin Towers, a state-of-the-art facility that was built in the 1990s as the home for the county’s most dangerous prisoners. But the jail instead has been used for lower-security inmates, mostly women and the mentally ill.

Until now, department officials have said that they lacked the staffing needed to house violent offenders at Twin Towers. Instead, they housed the most dangerous inmates at the much older Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, where seven inmates have been slain in the last 2 1/2 years.

Sheriff Lee Baca said the move to Twin Towers would ease tensions at other facilities, including the violence-plagued jail complex at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, where racially charged riots over the last few days have left one inmate dead and more than 50 injured.

Officials said some violence continued Tuesday but involved relatively few inmates.

Although Pitchess houses many dangerous offenders, it was not designed with the same security as Twin Towers.

“It will allow us to take the more difficult and violent inmates and put them into the tower, which has a more suitable housing design for that type person,” Baca said Tuesday. “It is a hard-lock environment that is meant for a serious offender.”

As officials investigated the disturbances of the last several days, they revealed that they had indications that a racial attack was brewing but were unable to prevent it.

The Twin Towers, a high-rise looming over the 101 Freeway in the Los Angeles Civic Center area, is a $373-million complex with 4,100 beds and security features lacking at Pitchess and many of the county’s other jails.

But Twin Towers has come to symbolize the county’s financial problems. It was supposed to open in 1995, but sat empty for two years because the county lacked the $100 million needed to operate it.

Marc Klugman, chief of custodial services for the Sheriff’s Department, said women inmates would move out of Twin Towers and into the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood on March 25.

Beginning in late March, high-security male prisoners will move into Twin Towers. They will not be relocated all at once, Klugman said, because the department has too few deputies to guard them all. Instead, inmates will fill up one tower floor by floor, as deputies are transferred from other posts to guard them and new deputies are hired.

“This is going to be big for us,” Klugman said. “This is the first total reorganization of the jails in quite a while.”

For now, mentally ill inmates will stay in the jail’s other tower.

The department plans to use a computer database to decide where inmates should be assigned, with the most violent offenders sent to Twin Towers. Those accused of lesser crimes would be housed in one of three jails at the Castaic facility or at Men’s Central, Klugman said.

Officials said that using Twin Towers would allow deputies to better manage the most violent part of the jail population.

The inmate killings at Men’s Central have been blamed in part on the jail’s antiquated layout. In one case, an inmate was stomped to death when left unsupervised in a private room with violent gang members. In another, an inmate was able to walk freely through the jail and kill another inmate who was supposed to testify against him in a murder case.

Twin Towers was built with cells around a security booth that allows deputies to monitor each cell without leaving the safety of the booth. It also has far more one- and two-person cells, which allow officials to isolate problem inmates. In contrast, some county jails have dormitory-style layouts.

Klugman said deputies had dealt with a few “one-on-one” incidents in the jail system Tuesday. But so far, there had been none of the major racial brawls that had plagued the system since Saturday.

In response to the most recent violence, officials said a group of gang members and accused murderers would be moved this week from Pitchess and the Men’s Central Jail to more secure cells throughout the system.

Sheriff’s officials said they had tried to forestall the violence. “We knew that something was going to be happening, but we did not know when, where or what time or what facility,” said Sammy Jones, who as chief of the custodial division is responsible for the jails’ operations.

Jones said he added 11 deputies to the staff at Pitchess on Saturday in hopes of warding off an incident.

The deputies were organized into roving teams to patrol the detention center.

But despite the added manpower, the deputies who work as guards in the jails were overwhelmed by a riot involving hundreds of inmates.

“It was almost instantaneous,” Jones said.

The extra staff, Jones said “was not even close” to enough to break up the melee. Moreover, he said, many of the deputies on duty that day had little or no jail experience.

“You could see it in their eyes -- they were like deer in the headlights,” Jones said. “Some of the deputies and custodial assistants, it was their first night.”

Officials now believe that the original violence Saturday was “greenlighted” by the Mexican Mafia prison gang, Klugman said.

Throughout the state, county sheriffs and state prison wardens are concerned that the violence could spread.

The jail situation also was playing out on a political level.

At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, some officials criticized the Sheriff’s Department for its continuing problems in managing the jails.

Supervisors said they were particularly concerned about the department’s pace in hiring new deputies to help ease tensions in the jails. New deputies are required to work for several years in the jails.

The department has had trouble recruiting and retaining deputies, in part because of the jail service requirement.

Supervisor Gloria Molina on Tuesday suggested that the county might consider creating a special custodial department that would hire jail guards directly into the system.

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Times staff writers Amanda Covarrubias in Castaic and Megan Garvey in Los Angeles contributed to this report.