Breakout jail ideas

ON SUNDAY nights in the Times newsroom of the 1980s and early ‘90s, you always knew who the new kid was: the reporter who came running up to the city desk sometime around 9 o’clock, hollering, “I just heard on the scanner -- there’s a race riot up at the Honor Rancho!”

“Honor Rancho” is what they once called the Castaic jail, on Los Angeles County’s northern border. The grizzled old newsguys would calmly say, “Yeah, thanks, kid.” Someone might pound out a few paragraphs for the paper. A week or two later, it would happen all over again: another riot, and another cub reporter -- I was once one of them -- all pumped up, thinking this was the biggest prisoner story since Attica.

A couple of times a year, The Times wrote a big story about the underlying causes of the brawls. Almost always, they were the same: overcrowding, understaffing, bored, angry inmates looking to make nothing much into something big.

Fights broke out over bad bunk assignments, someone hogging the phone and, once, the sale of a bag of potato chips. The battles didn’t always start as racial fights, but that’s where they ended up. Once they began, the gang lines and color lines were drawn.

Last weekend it happened again. One prisoner was killed in a four-hour brawl, the ninth killing in the county’s jails in 2 1/2 years. Maddeningly, the causes are still the same. Do the remedies have to be too?

The Castaic jail opened in 1938 as the Wayside Honor Farm, where minor miscreants, mostly drunks, were on their honor not to escape. They grew produce and made toys for poor kids. Among its alumni was Shirley Temple’s first husband.

The jail changed its name along with its character. In 1949, it dropped “farm” for “rancho,” making the place sound like a western movie set. In the 1950s, it added a maximum-security building but stayed low key; a book drive for the jail library asked in particular for poetry, philosophy and psychology.

In 1983, it became the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho, named for a former sheriff. After a couple of jailbreaks, Castaic locals realized that it wasn’t populated just by inebriates and pickpockets, and in 1995 the county admitted the obvious, dumping “honor” and calling what had become a multi-jail compound the Pitchess Detention Center.

In 1938, the honor and labor principles made the place an altogether new kind of jail. It could be again, by addressing its old quandaries with 21st century fixes. Sheriff Lee Baca can look to a lot of places for ways to solve staffing and race problems, not just to the L.A. County checkbook.

* New sheriff’s deputies are not always happy to find themselves assigned to the jails -- patrolling cells, not cities, for their first four or five years. Other places have been wooing them away with ads such as “Get Out of Jail Free.” So stop funneling deputies into the jails. Create a new job classification and recruit career jailers. That can generate new problems -- consider the political muscle of California’s state prison guards -- but the benefits eclipse the complications.

* Operate more how-not-to-screw-up-your-life jail programs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger added “rehabilitation” to the state prisons’ mission; doing the same at county jails could pay back its expense many times over.

After last weekend’s rioting, Baca said he got a note from a Latino inmate in the Castaic jail asking, “Please separate us race by race for everyone’s safety.”

Race segregation is the fastest and cheapest way to limit the brawls, but far from the best. The Supreme Court has ordered California prisons to end 25 years of automatically segregating new prisoners by race alone. Now prisons are getting down to details, taking factors such as gang membership into account before processing inmates.

As for the battles that start small but end up as race wars, a pilot program in the state’s prison near Susanville plucks out the troublemakers, drops them into a “behavior modification unit” -- a timeout for bad grown-ups -- and gives them three months to clean up their acts if they want to rejoin the general prison population and its privileges. So far, says the state, so good.

At least Baca has now pledged to move thousands of the country’s baddest inmates into the downtown Twin Towers Jail. Will cleaning up their acts have to wait until inmates cycle out of the jails and into the prisons?

Next Monday, a new face joins the force. Actor Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk, gets sworn in as a sheriff’s reservist. Everyone loves a photo-op with a Hollywood character. But Baca needs some new answers in the worst way. I hope this isn’t his idea of one of them.

PATT MORRISON’s e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.