Nearly 500 inmates fought Wednesday in racially charged melees at Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, marking a fifth day of violence in the Los Angeles County jail system and underscoring officials' inability to stop unrest tied to street conflicts between Latino and black gangs.
The toll in recent days has been high: one dead, at least 28 hospitalized and nearly 90 injured in rioting in the nation's largest jail system.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday February 10, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 3 inches; 104 words Type of Material: Correction
Jail riots -- An article in Thursday's Section A about rioting at Los Angeles County jails said that sheriff's officials had been forced to transfer 1,000 inmates from the East Facility of the Pitchess Detention Center to the center's North Facility. The inmates were transferred to the nearby North County Correctional Facility. The article also said that the North Facility population had grown from 3,500 to 4,100 medium-high to high-security-risk inmates. That population increase occurred at the North County Correctional Facility. Also, the article said that more than 1,000 Pitchess inmates had been involved in fights through Wednesday. The actual number is about 2,800.
More than 1,000 inmates at Pitchess have taken part in the disturbances, throwing bunk beds from balconies and using their fists and legs to fight each other, officials said.
Fights during the day Wednesday injured 19 inmates. Four were sent to hospitals, one with a serious head injury.
Another fight occurred late Wednesday, resulting in superficial injuries to a few inmates, authorities said. Order was quickly restored and the facility was locked down, said Sheriff's Deputy Oscar Butao. As a precaution, he said, all of the county's other jails also were locked down.
The large-scale racial fighting spread Wednesday to at least one other county facility: Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, where 40 inmates battled, injuring 10 and sending four to hospitals, according to a Sheriff's Department document. Deputies used pepper balls to break up that fight.
The unrest has festered despite lockdowns and emergency racial segregation in large part because the system's available beds require nearly all inmates to live in dormitory-style housing, officials said. With only about 1,000 single cells available in a system that houses 21,000 people, jailers said, even in times of crisis it is impossible to separate all inmates.
The facilities nearly all predate the explosion of gang-related crime in Los Angeles County and are ill-equipped to handle increasingly violent inmates, officials said.
"Now we're in essence a mini state prison," said Sgt. Mark McCorkle, an aide to Sammy Jones, chief of the sheriff's Custody Division. "It's no longer the drunk drivers and the misdemeanors and the petty thieves. The type of inmate we house is typically a hard-core felon, and an increased number of those have a desire to make their [reputations] before going on to state prison, and that often breaks down to racial attacks."
Though racial tensions have always been high in the county jail system, officials said, in recent years the domination of Latino gangs has shifted the jail power structure and left African Americans particularly vulnerable to attacks.
