Fixing L.A. County’s jails

No one disputes that Los Angeles County’s jails are in need of a serious overhaul — not even Sheriff Lee Baca, who runs them and who recently told The Times that he deserved to have his “butt whipped” for allowing the violence in the jails to fester.

Now, two plans have emerged to address the problems. They are to be voted on by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. One, backed by Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Zev Yaroslavsky, calls for creating a commission to investigate deputy abuse and issue a corrective plan. The other, by Supervisor Gloria Molina, would call on Baca to implement a series of previous recommendations that have largely been ignored. These include eliminating the steel-toed shoes worn by deputies, rotating deputies between floors and among facilities twice a year, and installing video cameras in the jails’ corridors — first suggested more than a decade ago.

The two plans are good as far as they go, but neither is a substitute for accountability — something that is in short supply in the Sheriff’s Department.

Baca is an elected official, and nobody but the voters can get rid of him, which appears unlikely given that no living sheriff has been voted out of office in Los Angeles County in at least 80 years. The last incumbent to lose was Sherman Block, who died in 1998 just a few days shy of election day.

The supervisors have limited power over Baca. That may not be such a bad thing if you consider their track record managing other troubled agencies, but it does tie their hands in times of crisis. Nor is there a civilian agency similar to the Police Commission, which supervises and sets policy for the Los Angeles Police Department. There is an outside monitor, Special Counsel Merrick Bobb, but his recommendations seem to be frequently ignored, and he has no power to force Baca to act. There were also reforms suggested in the 1992 Kolts Report, but those languished as well.

One bit of leverage the supervisors do have is a measure of control over the jails’ budget. Threatening Baca’s funding may be enough to get his attention and persuade him to start implementing some reforms, but the larger problem is the culture in the department that over time has given rise to violence, gang-like cliques of deputies in some stations and an alleged code of silence among deputies in the jails.

Even after decades of complaints and attempts at improvement, L.A. jails remain a blight. The board should not waste this opportunity, now that Baca is paying attention, to demand the reforms that he has previously ignored.