A tale of two jails

MEN’S CENTRAL JAIL IN downtown L.A. is a dark, depressing box that is home to hundreds of violent inmates. The cells are sealed with old-fashioned, hand-crank-operated steel gates that look like they could have been used at Alcatraz. The escalators don’t work. The cells are built in rows, so it’s impossible for guards to see into all of them without continually walking up and down the aisles. If a misbehaving inmate gets pepper sprayed, the chemical often travels through the ventilation system and causes sore eyes and burning lungs throughout the building.

Nobody ever said a trip to jail was supposed to be fun. But in L.A. County, it’s needlessly dangerous or even deadly. Just this winter, more than 150 inmates have been injured and two have died in violent altercations. In the last 2 1/2 years, 10 jail inmates have been killed by other inmates. The rest endure miserable, overcrowded conditions that have prompted numerous lawsuits, including a class-action suit now underway in U.S. District Court over floor sleeping. The lawsuit could cost the county as much as $100 million.

In an effort to end the violence and improve conditions, Sheriff Lee Baca has made numerous appeals for more money to boost staffing and open shuttered or underused facilities. In response, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky came up with a dramatic proposal this week: a bond measure worth as much as $500 million.

Is that kind of taxpayer spending really necessary? Over the coming months, supervisors, and possibly voters, will give serious thought to that question. When they do, they should consider a few things they aren’t being told.

Baca often compares L.A. County’s jails with New York’s as a way of demonstrating how underfunded his department remains. In New York, the average inmate population is about 13,750, which is overseen by a uniformed and civilian staff of more than 11,000. In L.A. County, more than 21,000 inmates are overseen by a staff of roughly 5,000. That’s a dramatic contrast, but the comparison is also disingenuous.

New York City runs the Rolls-Royce of big-city jail systems. In terms of spending per inmate, L.A. is actually above most big cities. L.A. County spends roughly $27,800 per inmate, compared with $20,000 in Chicago’s Cook County, $15,800 in Houston’s Harris County and $23,700 in Philadelphia. New York City spends about $61,000 per inmate.

This doesn’t mean that L.A. County jails are adequately funded. The violence, lawsuits and decrepit facilities show that they’re not; further, most big-city jail systems are underfunded and face problems similar to L.A.’s. The cost of living is also higher here, requiring higher guard salaries, and L.A.’s gang culture produces particularly violent, dangerous inmates. There is little question that the county needs to spend more on its jails than it does now. But it’s unlikely it needs to spend as much as New York does.

Another issue is whether a bond measure is the proper response to this problem. Los Angeles has tried that before, with very poor results.

Voters often assume that if they pass a bond measure and cough up a big chunk of money to solve a problem, it will go away. In reality, the money sometimes just creates new problems. That’s what happened in L.A. County more than a decade ago.

In the 1980s, crime was a burning political issue in California. Legislators and voters passed a number of new laws, including the so-called three-strikes law that increased criminal penalties and caused the incarcerated population to skyrocket. Voters also passed state bond measures to pay for new prisons and jails to house them.

Two of those measures, passed in 1986 and 1988, brought nearly $248 million to L.A. County to build a new jail; the county took out another $125 million in bonds and built the $373-million Twin Towers jail near Men’s Central. Comparing them is like comparing the Queen Mary to the Starship Enterprise.

In Twin Towers, completed in 1995, there are no bars -- the cells are sealed with tempered glass. There are no dorms, and each cell has an intercom connected to a guard station so that if an inmate is being attacked, he can call for help. There is a medical building with state-of-the-art (for 1995) technology, and there are exercise and visitor rooms on each floor, eliminating the need for inmates to walk unsupervised through the jail, which has led to violence.

Yet Twin Towers has for a decade been an embarrassing albatross. By the time it was finished, the county was in serious budget trouble and couldn’t come up with the $100 million a year needed to operate it. So it sat empty for a couple of years, then became a stopgap facility for housing female inmates and the mentally ill, not the maximum-security male inmates for whom it was designed. Baca is working on a plan to shift the women to another jail so that violent male inmates can be housed at Twin Towers, but even then the lack of staff and money will probably ensure that the jail remains underused.

The lesson is that it’s foolish to build or rebuild facilities if there is no money available to operate them. A bond measure would bring in a one-time infusion of cash to spend on capital improvements, but that would only add to the county’s ongoing operating expenses while adding nothing to the general fund.

So far, Yaroslavsky is alone in backing a bond measure. Supervisor Mike Antonovich opposes it, saying money can be shifted from other areas in the general fund to pay for the jail system. Given that he hasn’t proposed where to take the money from, that isn’t very helpful. Supervisor Gloria Molina is interested in a bond but isn’t satisfied that all other possible solutions have been explored. Given that the county has been trying ways to solve its overcrowding issues since they led to a jailhouse riot in 1921, one wonders what new brainstorm she’s waiting for.

There is no doubt that the county needs money, possibly in the hundreds of millions, to upgrade its jails. Unless supervisors demonstrate the willingness and ability to operate those upgraded jails once they’re fixed, though, voters should think twice before approving a big jail bond.