He's 42 and bearded, thin as a dry twig, hands cuffed behind him. When he gets out, he says, he wants to play baseball, be a rock star and get a paper route.
"Just call me Mickey Vin Priestly," he says, making up a name and telling me it's "very miserable" on the seventh floor of the Los Angeles County Jail. "Everybody keeps trying to poison me."
After we talk, deputies march the schizophrenic inmate back to his cell and lock the door behind him. Mickey Vin Priestly, in custody since September on an attempted robbery rap, immediately begins pacing his concrete box and talking to the walls.
On the same block of Tower 1, one prisoner is banging on a door with thunderous blows. Another man stands trance-like in front of his door for all to see, buck naked.
The doors and windows of other cells are plastered with warnings to jail staff.
Kicker. Biter. Spitter. Suicide Watch.
"I run the biggest mental hospital in the country," Sheriff Lee Baca often says.
That's a bit misleading, since only a small percentage of inmates actually need inpatient hospital services. But with roughly 2,000 inmates who've been identified by the jail as having mental issues, about two-thirds of whom are in for nonviolent crimes, Baca has a point.
People are locked up for being mentally ill, essentially, because there's nowhere else to put them. The jail is a dumping bin, teeming with inmates the jailers are ill-equipped and too understaffed to help, and sometimes can't even protect.
On Nov. 16, 35-year-old Chadwick Shane Cochran's mental problems cost him his life.
A drifter whose friends said he suffered from paranoia and delusions, Cochran was brought in out of the rain in October by an elderly Covina woman who let him stay in a trailer behind her house. When he said he was afraid that people were out to get him, she gave him a revolver, in the misguided belief that it would make him feel safe. Instead, it got him arrested for being a felon in possession of a gun.
Cochran's mental history landed him in the Twin Towers, along with other sick inmates. But he wasn't as sick as some of the others, and since there's just not room to segregate every mentally ill prisoner, Cochran got transferred over to the hard-core Men's Central facility, which resembles a dungeon.
