In a better world it would be rather touching, the way that for many years now — for decades — the members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors have acted as if they were protecting incarcerated Angelenos in the hell hole that is Men’s Central Jail by acting as if jail qua jail were the problem and promising not to build another one if Central were torn down.
Jail is never nice, but it is not the problem here. Working on reforms to the way we as a society put people into the slammer is fine — important and necessary. But in the meantime, which has become a very long time indeed, such work is entirely aspirational, considering the appalling conditions thousands of inmates continue to live in every day. And it’s a major scandal that Los Angeles County won’t do anything about it.
As Jason Henry reported over the weekend in “Mold, rats and neglect: a year of inspections at Men’s Central Jail reveals ‘horrific’ conditions,” right here in our affluent county the local lockup is akin to that of a Third World dictatorship’s. And it’s the fault of our electeds, including our Sheriff’s Department, which we support with a $4 billion annual budget, to no avail. “People have gotten numb to the horrors and I don’t know what its going to take to jolt the county out of their paralysis,” said an ACLU attorney.
Mold covers the walls and the air vents. Rodents run at large. Sanitary kits are not available because of a “supply-chain issue.” Toilets don’t work. Cell doors don’t lock, leaving the inmates to decide on their own whether to wander. Inmates make their own mops out of plastic sticks and socks in order to clean up. Showers are sometimes not allowed even on a weekly basis. Going to report a noose hanging in a cell, inspectors found eight guards gathered around a computer watching porn rather than doing their jobs.
The Board of Supervisors has commissioned studies on how to tear down Men’s Central and distribute the inmates to other sites while the county figures out whether or not to build what the Sheriff’s Department calls a “state-of-the-art Care Campus facility, designed to provide rehabilitative services for those individuals remanded to our care.”
That sounds fine. Meanwhile, it’s a crime that the county won’t take action to stop today’s inhumane abuses.
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