"I don't even want to talk about how long this has been going on," Eliasberg says. "It's mind-boggling. And there's a level of frustration that you report this stuff over and over, and the county and sheriff's response is always, 'We've looked into it, it's not true, prisoners lie.' It's hard to get a hold on all of the violence because it's he said, he said, and it generally happens without people seeing it."
The incident with Whitmore and Lim was just the latest chapter in the contentious, often frosty relationship between the ACLU and the Sheriff's Department.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
The Men's Central Jail
Carrillo several days after being beaten
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When asked about the ACLU, Whitmore says, "The sheriff supports the ACLU in spirit — we just have a problem with their exaggerations and overstatements."
As for how the ACLU perceives the Sheriff's Department, Eliasberg says: "We've made a number of efforts over the years to try to figure out ways to close MCJ and make improvements for the benefit of both the inmates and the guards. I can't say every single suggestion we've made has been rejected, but we've made a huge number that nothing has happened on."
Last summer, for example, the ACLU came up with an idea to reduce the inmate population just enough to close Men's Central Jail — which Baca agrees needs to be done — without having to build a new one.
The ACLU offered to pay Dr. James Austin, a national expert on prisons and overcrowding, to examine the inmate population to see if there were ways to thin the herd. Austin crunches the numbers to find ways to reclassify inmates, potentially allowing them to be put on monitored release or in lower-security areas. Among his successes, Austin was able to reduce the prison population in Mississippi and save the state hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
"Jim was able to help us reduce our maximum-security population from 2,000 to 200 and save us a whole ton of money," says Christopher Epps, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. "We also were able to close a 1,000-bed facility. I'm glad we paid Jim to help us — and if it was free, we definitely would have jumped on it."
Austin's proposal for L.A. County called for analyzing Men's Central Jail inmate information, which the Sheriff's Department told him was easily accessible, and 90 days later issuing a report with recommendations. The work wouldn't cost Los Angeles County a penny because it would be financed by the ACLU.
At first, the sheriff refused, Eliasberg says. Baca and the county counsel's office then said it would give Austin the data but only if it was placed under a court seal, meaning the information could never be made public. Austin also could not disclose his findings about ways to reduce the inmate population and close down Men's Central Jail.
"We said, 'So if Austin does a report saying the facility could be emptied out and the sheriff is holding people he doesn't need to, we can't make that public?' " says Eliasberg. "It would be like the report didn't exist. So in the end, they refused to allow the best expert in the country to come in."
None of the five county supervisors returned L.A. Weekly's request for comment, but Supervisor Michael Antonovich's justice deputy, Anna Pembedjian, says she has never heard of the Austin proposal. Whitmore says the same.
However, Assistant County Counsel Roger Granbo has heard about Austin's idea. Granbo says the consensus from the county's side was that Austin's report was not necessary. Granbo says that while the ACLU "wanted to use it as a public document, that really was not something we were interested in."
This lack of transparency has long been a sticking point with critics of the jail. Complaints against individual deputies, discipline records and investigative reports that would reveal how internal investigations are conducted are not publicly available and are accessible to attorneys only under a protective seal.
The ACLU complains that Baca refuses to share the annual number of complaints received through the jail's inmate grievance system, which processes thousands more complaints a year than the ACLU receives, or the nature of the complaints or the resolutions reached.
"The [sheriff] has, for years, refused to disclose ... how it reviews use-of-force incidents [or] what criteria it uses to assess the 'reasonableness' of the force used," states an ACLU report. "This lack of transparency and accountability may only serve to reinforce a culture within LASD that allows abuse of prisoners to go relatively unchecked since, in the end, there is apparently no independent source for weighing the prisoner's word against the deputy's."
In essence, critics conclude, Baca keeps reams of meaningful data to himself and asks the public to trust his word that the world's biggest jail is really not that bad.
Whitmore acknowledges the problem but says the county's hands are tied.
"There are various things that have nothing to do with the Sheriff's Department," he says. "Personnel records are private, and the Peace Officers Bill of Rights prevents the sheriff from releasing deputy names. I don't know how you'd get around that."
