Cycle of Jail Woes Generates Few Fixes

The racially charged melees that have rocked Los Angeles County jails over the last two weeks are the latest flare-ups in a long-troubled system where problems are well-known but fixes rare.

The outbreaks, which left two inmates dead and more than 100 injured, have been remarkably similar to violence that hit county jails in 2000, 1996, 1985 and 1971: Clashes between black and Latino inmates and too few cells for the most dangerous inmates, forcing officials to place them in lower-security dormitories.

In the aftermath of each disturbance, the Board of Supervisors called on the sheriff to fix the problem and the sheriff called on the Board of Supervisors to give him more money.

Along the way, sheriff’s officials and outside experts have made numerous proposals to lessen racial tensions and remove the highest security-risk inmates from group settings.

Most of the efforts have fallen by the wayside, victims of budget cuts and overcrowding -- revisited only when the latest round of fights threatens the safety of guards and leave inmates dead or injured.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca is scheduled to appear today before the Board of Supervisors for the first time since the disturbances began, responding to criticism of his department’s handling of the disturbances.

But no one expects the meeting to resolve the underlying problems. Part of the disconnect is rooted in how the county government is structured.

Unlike the Los Angeles police chief, who is appointed by the mayor and answers to a Police Commission, the sheriff is an independently elected official with the Board of Supervisors controlling the overall Sheriff’s Department budget but not how the funds are spent.

And unlike the supervisors, who are elected by voters only in their individual districts, the sheriff is elected by voters from across the county -- giving him added standing in any showdowns with the board.

“The divided system of government leaves nobody accountable,” said Bill Boyarsky, vice president of Los Angeles’ city Ethics Commission, author of several books about state politics and a former Times editor.

“In the city there’s a police chief and if he screws up he can be fired by the Police Commission and the mayor,” he said. “But here you have an independent sheriff who’s an independent operator, and then you have these five supervisors who have no control over him and whose general reaction to any kind of crisis is: ‘Oh my God! Why didn’t somebody tell me about this?’ ”

As the back-and-forth has continued between the sheriff and the supervisors, so have jail conditions that have been out of step with other major urban areas and widely acknowledged as fostering racial conflict.

The same factors still exist decades after they were cited as dangerous. Dormitories meant for petty criminals instead house suspected felons.

Nonviolent offenders are still placed in the same rooms or cells as inmates known to be violent.

Brawls have had the same triggers for generations -- overcrowding, small inconveniences and racial tension. In 1921, more than 400 inmates packed into cells built for 200 clashed after deputies stopped one man from lighting papers to heat his coffee.

In 1991, a dormitory at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic was the scene of unrest after Latino and black inmates each blamed the other group for the removal of an electric coffeepot.

Racial conflict increasingly became a defining cause of fights. In 1978 an argument between a Latino inmate and a black inmate over work pants escalated into widespread, racially motivated unrest. When Latinos began to outnumber black inmates in the late 1980s, another wave of violence broke out as Latino gangs tried to establish dominance.

As blacks began to take the brunt of the violence, some community activists called for segregation along racial lines -- arguing that it was the only way to keep members of different races safe behind bars. Activists have made the same plea for segregation in recent days.

Although county officials planned for new jails at various points, they weren’t able to keep pace with the booming population or increasingly violent inmates. Facilities billed as modern and maximum security were often outdated by the time they opened -- suitable for drunks and burglars but not the gang members who now make up as much as 80% of the jail population.

No new jail has been planned in more than a decade and the newest facilities, which need the most staff, are underused or partially shuttered to save money.

So why hasn’t more been done?

“When you go out on the campaign and give a stump speech, protecting prisoners is not an applause line,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said.

But jail conditions that allow violence to flare up rarely can be fixed overnight.

In 2000, sheriff’s officials unveiled several proposals to reduce racially charged fighting at Pitchess, where brawls between Latinos and blacks had seriously injured several dozen inmates -- most of whom were black.

One solution, jail officials said, was to move inmates under the age of 35 out of dormitory-style housing and into smaller cells.

Also proposed: moving anyone facing murder charges out of dorms and into more secure housing.

But six years later neither proposal has been implemented.

Marc Klugman, head of the sheriff’s Correctional Services Division, said he believed that both measures would have failed to solve key problems facing the jails.

“If I have high-security-risk people, then age isn’t the issue, it’s the demeanor,” he said. “We have husbands who have killed wives or wives who have killed husbands who are not going to be as big of a security risk as a gang member accused of assault.”

Klugman said officials now plan to have a centralized housing system in place by the end of March when the state-of-the-art Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles -- built in the 1990s -- partially opens for the first time to the maximum-security inmates it was designed to hold.

By assigning inmates specific cells or dorms when they first enter the system, Klugman said, jail officials hope to better control the mix of people in any given area.

For his part, Baca sees parallels between the violence he is now trying to control and conditions in the 1990s when some of the worst violence in the history of the county jails erupted at Pitchess -- the same complex where 2,000 inmates rioted on Feb. 4 in a fight that killed a 45-year old black inmate and injured scores of prisoners.

A decade earlier, one day of racially charged fighting among more than 5,000 inmates at Pitchess left more than 140 injured, nine critically, in violence that sheriff’s officials said left “rivers of blood” in the dorms’ aisles. The melees then, like the ones this month, were attributed to Mexican Mafia prison gang leaders ordering Latinos to assault blacks.

The fights in the mid-1990s, Baca said, occurred during or right after significant financial cutbacks and staff reductions.

This month’s unrest comes as the Sheriff’s Department is beginning to recover from cuts the supervisors made to his budget in 2002.

“The disturbances are the byproduct of a system that has condensed itself,” Baca said.

Baca said those cuts, which he said made it necessary to expand early release of inmates and to step up parole programs, exacerbated an existing imbalance in the population, weighting it even more heavily toward violent felons and away from the misdemeanor population.

His decision to appear today before the Board of Supervisors comes after he declined to appear at last week’s meeting. As the board met, Baca appeared on a radio talk show. He sent three aides to address the board, where they faced tense questioning.

“He should have come to the meeting,” Supervisor Mike Antonovich said afterward.

But Baca dismissed that criticism.

“Browbeating department heads becomes the standard mode of operation,” Baca said.

“It absolves people from accepting responsibility for the real solution -- it becomes a form of grandstanding,” he said.

In some ways, even this standoff is a replay of the past.

“One sheriff got in trouble just as I was coming on the board -- Sheriff [Peter] Pitchess -- because he refused to come to the board to answer questions,” recalled former supervisor Ed Edelman, who served on the board from 1974 to 1994. “The sheriff can’t ignore the board.”