During a federal court hearing, the parties discussed a stipulated temporary restraining order — expected to be filed Friday, Sept. 16 — designed to help move mentally ill inmates and others out of the inmate reception center and into secure housing within 24 hours. It’s an issue that’s come up before in the 44-year history of federal oversight of the county jail system.
“This problem’s been going on for decades,” said U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson, who is overseeing the case. “The only way out of this is to provide adequate funding.”
ACLU attorneys who visited the LASD inmate reception center late last month reported unhygienic conditions, including floors littered with trash, overflowing sinks and toilets, no access to showers or clean clothes for days, and lack of adequate access to drinking water and food. The ACLU also claims the facility is negligent in providing adequate health care, including failing to provide people with serious mental illness or chronic medical conditions their medications and failing to provide care to people dangerously detoxing from drugs and alcohol. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department runs the jail system. A spokesperson said the department cannot comment due to pending litigation.
At a hearing in the case on Thursday, Sept. 15, Robert Dugdale, an attorney representing Sheriff Alex Villanueva, did not dispute the ACLU’s assessment of conditions at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. He said the situation at the facility’s booking center has deteriorated, and the place is a mess for a variety of reasons, including a large influx of mentally ill detainees and the end of the pandemic-induced zero bail policy in which individuals accused of low-level offenses were booked and released in order to reduce the inmate population.
The ACLU National Prison Project and the ACLU of Southern California filed an emergency motion last week, asking Judge Pregerson to order the county to limit custody at the reception center to 24 hours. Melissa Camacho-Cheung, senior staff attorney at the ACLU SoCal, told the court that reception center detainees were “suffering in some rather horrific ways. The most vulnerable in this group are being left chained to a bench. They’re supposed to be removed from the chairs so they can use the bathroom, but people end up defecating on themselves.” At the time of her visit, conditions were “so filthy, it’s hard to imagine,” she said.
Conditions at L.A. County jails, the largest jail system in the nation, have been the subject of court oversight since 1978, when a federal court judge ruled in the ACLU SoCal case Rutherford v. Pitchess, finding numerous conditions that violate the constitutional rights of people incarcerated.
“The L.A. County Jail system is a national disgrace,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project, said in a statement. “For almost 50 years, the jail has been under court oversight to provide the most basic minimum standards of sanitation, health care and human decency to people detained there. Enough is enough.”
Law enforcement agencies arrest and take people to the reception center, where they are meant to get booked and transferred to another facility within 24 hours. Many of the people detained there are unhoused, have serious mental illnesses, or both, according to the ACLU. Dugdale said that when the “zero bail” policy was enacted, the jail population dropped from 17,000 to 12,000 inmates, but since the policy was terminated in July, the detainee population has risen to nearly 14,800. Complicating matters, the mentally ill make up about 45% of the inmate population, he said. The L.A. County jail system is “the largest defacto mental health facility in the country,” Dugdale said.
Both Dugdale and the ACLU agreed to fine-tune a stipulated temporary restraining order to address the situation and file it in L.A. federal court on Friday, Sept. 16.
Previous related story: ACLU seeks court order against LA County over conditions at jail facility
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No Name says
As a former Inmate Reception Center employee, I agree the place is filthy and takes too long to process Inmates. Time constraints are put against the Deputies, when in reality some of the problem is that medical staff take their sweet time or are incompetent.
Most of the filthy mess is made faster than it can be cleaned up. A lot of inmates intentionally make messes to spite the system. Since the inception of the current facility, there has always been a space and Line staffing shortage in relation to amount of processing and cleaning needed.
Much of the time, it is not logistically feasible to move inmates around adequately, for a more thorough cleaning. Not to mention, it is a 24/7 operation. One can’t simply compare it to a Hospital. Almost all of the cleaning is done by Inmate workers who are not professional cleaners. There is no such thing as a “clean” Jail. Just because another Jail may “Look” clean doesn’t render it is sanitary. Yes, there is some room for improvement.
If a Jail is made too nice, Inmates won’t want to leave. There is a saying “If you do not like the accommodations at the Inn… YOU don’t check in! I can assure you, releasing inmates early will not solve the problem.
Criminal Inmates have learned how to pull and manipulate Liberals “Heart Strings”, by claiming they are victims. You give them an inch and they’re going to take a mile. Not given enough consequences for one’s actions aka early release, has virtually rendered Jails and Prisons as minor inconveniences instead of deterrents. People aren’t afraid to go to Jail anymore. This is the main culprit causing mass incarceration and recidivism rates.
Unless this is fixed, we are simply going to need more Jail/Prison facilities and staff to meet the demand. Man has free will, and most of the so called insanity today is illicit drug induced so, no sympathy. Those few who have congenital brain deformation insanity, need to be in mental institutions.
Remember, This is my opinion based on first hand knowledge (experience and observations).
Pardon the grammatical errors.