Winter recently handled a trial in Arizona involving abuses in the Maricopa County jail under hard-line Sheriff Joe Arpaio. She says, "The degree of violence is no comparison with the frequency and savagery we see in L.A. County jails."
Kelly Knapp, an attorney for the Prison Law Office in San Francisco, says L.A. County's Men's Central Jail "is known as notoriously bad in California and nationwide. It's crumbling down and is overcrowded ... and I think when we talk about conditions, old and crumbling down, they go hand in hand with abuse."
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Carrillo after his face healed
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
L.A. County's Twin Towers jail and medical services building
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The scope of the problem at the jail is difficult to assess because the Sheriff's Department keeps much of its information regarding force incidents and abuse out of public view.
The department has constructed a cone of silence around the issue of guard-on-inmate abuse and, according to the ACLU, does not disclose much information about excessive force — not details of internal investigations, not how it determines what is or is not "reasonable force," not the disciplinary actions, if any, taken against offending guards, not the number of complaints inmates make through the inmate grievance process. Attorneys who sue on behalf of abused inmates are prohibited from discussing a deputy's record of using force or the number and nature of complaints against him.
Referring to the Maricopa County case, Winter says, "We've had nothing like the problems in getting the statistical information that we're having in L.A. County."
In response to a public records request from the Weekly, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department revealed that between 2005 and 2010, there were 5,977 use-of-force incidents in all of the county's jails. Men's Central Jail was home to 1,958 of those incidents.
Lt. Mark McCorkle, charged with supervising the county's jails, says that in most cases the use of force is found to have been justified and that no criminal act or internal-policy violation occurred. After reviewing the above statistics, he points out that the number of incidents overall has declined recently throughout the county jails — from 1,051 in 2009 to 708 in 2010.
By refusing to release specific details about those cases in L.A., however, the Sheriff's Department makes it impossible for the public to determine the extent of the abuse problem in its jails. Absent those details, the sole source of information about the jails comes from the ACLU, which is limited to documenting claims of abuse and adding them to a thick federal court case file. The organization has no power to investigate.
Somewhat surprising, perhaps, is that critics of the jail and Sheriff Lee Baca have found one fact to agree upon: Men's Central Jail is unsupervisable and should be shuttered.
Given the county's current budget crisis, however, Baca says there's no money to build a new jail. So despite the troubling conditions and rising tide of inmates complaining to the ACLU about being beaten and treated poorly, life at Men's Central Jail marches on, one allegation of abuse at a time.
Located just east of Chinatown, about a mile from downtown, Men's Central Jail is a testament to hulking, early 1960s jail construction. At nearly 1 million square feet, with a current average of about 4,000 inmates housed there daily, the building has a massive, daunting exterior. Its interior, however, is medieval.
Many of the floors are made up of long corridors lined with cells, making it impossible to see into any one cell without standing directly in front of it. From a supervision standpoint, Men's Central Jail is a nightmare.
Baca and the ACLU blame the layout of Men's Central Jail, in part, for the difficulties overseeing abusive jailers.
"The way the cells are lined up and the way they crowd people in there, Central Jail looks like the hulls in slave ships or the bunks in Dachau," Eliasberg says. "They're in rows and rows of cells, and to think you can monitor and run something like that safely is insane."
For many years, the county's Office of Independent Review and the ACLU have advocated placing cameras throughout the jail to document what occurs. "There are times when deputies are not being held accountable because we can't reach the level of proof we need to go forward," says Michael Gennaco, chief attorney in the Office of Independent Review, which reviews force incidents and Baca's disciplinary decisions. "Cameras tend to be tiebreakers."
Some cameras do exist; however, Gennaco says many of the ones in Men's Central Jail are outdated and don't work well.
Eliasberg says the technology for camera surveillance in jails has existed since the 1980s, yet L.A. County has dragged its feet. "The county says it has no money for cameras, yet they have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay out lawsuit settlements," he says. In response to a public information request from the Weekly, Los Angeles County says it has paid out only $738,850 from 2008 through 2010 to settle lawsuits alleging abuse by jail deputies.
"We've got to start aggressively pursuing getting cameras in there," says Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for Baca. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors recently approved $7.2 million in one-time funding for closed-circuit television monitoring. But for it to be effective, even the Sheriff's Department concedes there needs to be a camera aimed down each hallway — and into nearly every one of the 2,825 cells.
