Los Angeles County's Jail Booking Center Has Become "A Living Hell" - ACLU
Conditions at the LA County Jail system have been the subject of court oversight since 1978
Inside the Los Angeles County jail’s booking center, people with severe mental illness are chained to benches or chairs for days on end, often forced to defecate and urinate on themselves, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleged in a court filing submitted in federal court last week. The Los Angeles County jail system’s Inmate Reception Center (IRC) has become so overcrowded that detainees are left to sleep on the ground, most of them without blankets, according to the ACLU. The floor is covered in garbage and urine. The men are denied showers and clean clothes. The toilets are clogged and smeared with feces.
The ACLU is seeks relief from the court to order Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva and the County of Los Angeles to limit custody at the IRC to no more than 24 hours and to ensure detainees are held in sanitary conditions with access to drinking water, working toilets, and medical care. The filing argues that the county should be compelled to act under the terms of a 1975 class-action lawsuit that successfully challenged rights violations at the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail.
“It is a living hell in here,” Gilberto, a detainee, told an ACLU attorney who visited in August. Gilberto, who has asthma, said that since he’d arrived at the IRC four days earlier, he had not been given an inhaler, which he typically uses three to four times a day. “The deputies treat us like animals and don’t give two shits about us.”
In response, the county and sheriff state the the reversal of a zero cash bail policy for most misdemeanors and low-level felonies has contributed to a “surge” of people churning through the IRC. The Los Angeles County Superior Court instituted a zero cash bail policy at the start of the pandemic in April 2020. The number of people being processed through the IRC quickly fell by nearly half, from about 86,000 in 2019 to about 45,000 in 2021. The policy “had a profound effect on the county’s overall jail census,” the county and sheriff told the court.
Since the reversal of the bail policy in July 2022, the number of people coming through the booking center “approximates the pre-pandemic 2019 pace,” according to the county and sheriff. Additionally, the county and sheriff noted the facility has been overwhelmed with new inmates entering the jail system, including a “skyrocketing number” with serious mental health conditions.
The county could reduce the number of people entering the jail system by voting to implement and make permanent the zero cash bail policy. With more than 14,000 people currently detained in Los Angeles County jails, the system is operating almost 20 percent over capacity. Nearly half of all people held in the Los Angeles County Jail System are awaiting trial and presumed innocent.
To read more details about the ACLU investigation and associated court documents in the case, visit the Rutherford v. Villanueva case page at ACLU website.
