A key part of the plan to quell racially charged violence in the Los Angeles County jail system -- canceling a contract that allows the state to keep roughly 1,300 prisoners in county facilities -- is in jeopardy.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last month to return the prisoners to the state, saying the move would free space in the overcrowded jails and remove some of the most violent offenders. Initially, Sheriff Lee Baca supported canceling the contract, though he said it could take up to six months to implement.
But since then, both the Sheriff's Department and David Janssen, the county's chief administrative officer, have expressed concerns about the plan. They say that the jails need the $27 million the contract brings in and that removing the state prisoners won't make the jail system safer. Supervisors will revisit the issue on April 4.
The dispute comes at a delicate time. Baca has said he needs at least $300 million to reopen the shuttered Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Monterey Park for female inmates and to move high-risk male offenders to the downtown Twin Towers jail, which now holds women and patients with mental disabilities.
Supervisors have embraced the need for improvements, but paying for them with a jail bond measure is still a matter of much debate.
The county jail system was struck by weeks of melees in February and early March, leaving two inmates dead and more than 150 wounded. The violence was largely between Latino and black inmates, underscoring racial tensions in the jails.
County supervisors argued that the state prisoners added a population of hardened criminals to a jail system already bulging with violent offenders. Many high-risk inmates are housed in open dorm areas -- where most of the recent melees began -- that were designed for low-risk inmates.
But Janssen said he looked at state prisoners' criminal backgrounds and found that only a small percentage of them were high-risk felons. He said removing them would do little to quell violence in the jails.
As of March 20, said Paul Tanaka, assistant sheriff, 730 state inmates were in the county jail system. Of those, 18.6% were "level 8s" and "level 9s," the highest threat levels in the county's inmate classification system. Throughout the entire jail system, he said, 25% to 28% of all inmates are levels 8 or 9.
"The argument that they -- state inmates -- are solely the problem is probably not true," Tanaka said.
