The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is expected today to ask Sheriff Lee Baca to prepare a report on Paris Hilton's release from jail in Lynwood -- just three days into her mandated 23-day stay -- to determine whether she was afforded special treatment.
Baca had cited an undisclosed medical condition for allowing Hilton to leave the Century Regional Detention Facility and serve the remainder of her sentence under home confinement. But a judge disagreed, sending her back to jail Friday.
Tony Bell, a spokesman for Supervisor Mike Antonovich, said his office had been told that judges were receiving requests for "the Paris Hilton treatment" from other county inmates wanting to be reassigned to home detention for medical reasons.
Paris Hilton: Articles in The Times about Paris Hilton's jail sentence have given differing accounts of how long the hotel heiress spent behind bars the first time before Sheriff Lee Baca released her. Hilton entered custody at 11:15 p.m. on June 3 and was released early in the morning of June 7. The Sheriff's Department credited her with five days in jail, but she actually served less than four full days.
A key focus of the board's review, officials said, will be Hilton's medical condition and whether authorities could have treated her at the Lynwood jail or moved her to the county jail medical ward. Baca will have one week to report back to supervisors.
"We have 20,000 inmates who were not comfortable, didn't like the food or were depressed in county jail," Bell said. "So to release Paris Hilton to home for medical reasons is clearly unfair. If her medical condition required immediate attention she should have been placed in Twin Towers, where she is now, and her issues addressed like any other inmate."
Baca told reporters last week that he released Hilton to home detention with electronic monitoring after she began "inexplicably deteriorating" while in jail. Baca did not detail her medical condition.
The difficulty many inmates have encountered in receiving medical care in the jail is documented in more than 10,000 confidential complaints filed by inmates from 2000 to 2005.
The records, reviewed by The Times in preparation for an article published last year, revealed an overwhelmed system in which sick inmates begged to be seen by a doctor for problems ranging from vaginal infections to mental illness. There was a backlog of several hundred inmates waiting to be seen.
It was common for inmates to wait a week or more to be evaluated, and when they were, they typically were treated and returned to their cells or sent to the jail's hospital.
"I feel myself becoming unglued, anxiety attacks, unstable," wrote one woman, who said her medication had run out two weeks earlier.
"Please," her hand-scrawled note read. "I need my medicine. Please."
