Theo Lacy is Orange County's largest and most notorious jail, the site of a highly publicized inmate homicide and the focus of a scathing report by the district attorney.
It was at the jail, on a busy street across from a popular shopping mall in Orange, that a mob of inmates took turns beating, kicking and sodomizing John Derek Chamberlain in 2006 while a guard watched television and exchanged cellphone text messages with friends.
Theo Lacy will be an immediate focus of the county's next sheriff, whom the Board of Supervisors is expected to appoint in the coming weeks. The new sheriff will be confronted by a grand jury investigation that found deputies at the lockup watched movies, napped or played video games while they were supposed to be watching inmates.
Most of the nine candidates for sheriff, who were interviewed by supervisors last week, said that restoring the public's confidence in the department -- reeling from the October criminal indictment of former Sheriff Michael S. Carona -- will be their priority. And confronting concerns about the 2,700-bed Theo Lacy facility will be one of the first steps in that process.
During a recent evening shift at the jail, deputies said the Theo Lacy described in the grand jury report is not the jailhouse they know. They said their morale had been hammered by the criticism and that the district attorney's April report -- based on months of testimony before a special grand jury -- focused on the actions of a minority within the department. Most deputies, they said, work hard to safeguard inmates in their charge.
Interim Sheriff Jack Anderson has taken steps to address concerns raised by the grand jury investigation: He fired one jail employee, suspended several others, obtained funding for closed-circuit televisions in guard booths and inmate dormitories and banned deputies from using electronic devices on the job.
Anderson also transferred dozens of deputies between the county's three main jail facilities, a move he said was intended to reduce complacency. The union that represents deputies took the department to court, saying the transfers violated the deputies' contract.
A judge sided with Anderson.
Anderson also launched what he said would become the largest internal-affairs investigation in department history and hired Michael Gennaco, chief attorney for the Los Angeles County sheriff's Office of Independent Review, to oversee the probe.
