Judge Orders Creation of Central Jail Reform Panel

A month after expressing dismay about conditions at Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, a federal judge ordered the creation of an expert panel to oversee reform at the facility -- an order signed late last week but released publicly Monday.

In May, U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson toured the downtown jail and called conditions “not consistent with basic human values.” His order requires a comprehensive plan for the facility -- the largest county jail in the nation -- to be completed within 60 days and to include “immediate measures for improvement.”

The recommendations will be made by a new panel of representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles County administrative office and a criminal justice planning firm. The panel’s first meeting must take place no later than Monday.

The panel’s accelerated schedule reflects Pregerson’s concern about conditions he witnessed at the jail, where inmates are often crammed six to a cell intended for four.

Under current practice, inmates spend almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week in those conditions -- and are given only a four-hour exercise break one day a week. ACLU officials contend that such living conditions exacerbated tensions in the jail and contributed to widespread jail rioting earlier this year that left two inmates dead and scores injured.

“Overcrowding, access to indoor recreation and outdoor exercise, these are all issues the ACLU has raised repeatedly as concerns. They are certainly things that we think contributed to the violence that erupted in February and the tensions that continue to exist in the jails,” said Jody Kent, jails project coordinator for the ACLU of Southern California, who will sit on the panel.

Men’s Central, widely considered to be the most trouble-plagued in the 18,000-bed jail system, was built in 1963 and expanded in the ‘70s. The building is ill-equipped to handle a jail population now largely made up of inmates awaiting trial on felony charges.

A preliminary report by a criminal justice consultant hired by the ACLU calls for the jail’s population of about 6,000 to be reduced by more than one-third. The report, given to Pregerson last week, proposed the immediate move of 1,800 high-security inmates to the adjacent Twin Towers facility, which remains partially empty because of chronic understaffing in the Sheriff’s Department. It also recommended cutting 500 inmates who are in the jail under a contract with the state to hold parolees who’d otherwise be sent back to an also overcrowded state prison system.

But Sheriff Lee Baca, who late Monday said he had not heard from Pregerson about the panel, said such a large reduction in the Men’s Central Jail population was “not structurally practical.”

In the last four years, jail overcrowding was exacerbated by staffing shortfalls and the lingering effect of budget cuts. In that time, more than 150,000 inmates sentenced to county jail time were released after serving only fractions of their sentences. Such releases were first permitted by a federal judge 20 years ago as a temporary means to alleviate overcrowding until more jail facilities could be built. Instead, a combination of factors led to continued use of such releases as a means to keep the jail population under federally mandated caps.

Baca, reelected this month to a third term, has said he hopes to end the practice. To do so, he has said he would need to expand the jails’ capacity to 30,000, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in construction and personnel. Baca said he was open to measures to improve inmate living conditions but warned that the overall population of the jails remains so high that such adjustments must be weighed against other concerns.

“The first thing we have to do is end the early release, and you can’t end the early release program when you’re cutting down jail beds,” he said.

Pulitzer/Bogard & Associates, a New York-based criminal justice consulting firm that prepared the preliminary report, was hired by the ACLU and began reviewing operations at Men’s Central Jail earlier this month. After touring the facility and reviewing court documents, the firm identified three areas to improve within the next six months: overcrowding, “out of cell” recreation time and safety. The report contends that such interim steps would allow the jail “to operate far more safely and effectively than is presently the case.”

The 10-page report said it was crucial to create a long-term plan to modernize jail facilities. “The largest jail in the United States cannot be fixed quickly or cheaply,” it said.

In his order, Pregerson called for a plan that sets forth the “most effective, cost-efficient and sustainable methods by which to make changes that are deemed feasible.”