There is no dispute over the fate of the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. The decrepit facility must be demolished as soon as possible – as soon as county leaders make alternative arrangements for the thousands of people who live there at any given time.
And there is the rub. What should we do with all those people, especially the large percentage of people who are incarcerated partly because of psychiatric or drug problems?
For years, the Board of Supervisors clung to the most rote and self-defeating answer: Build another jail, with a new name to reflect the new mindset. It will be called the Consolidated Correctional Treatment Facility, then the Mental Health Treatment Center. The current name is Care First Treatment Campus.
But all those fancy labels are just euphemisms for “prison.” They all described one large, secure building, located in the former Men’s Central Jail, surrounded by other jails, and staffed by sheriff’s deputies.
The board heard regular reports to monitor progress on closing the jail but failed to meet various deadlines, and then missed them. During a report last month, Sheriff Robert Luna said that although deputies are needed at treatment campuses, their roles may be limited. The board is noncommittal, although some of the watchdog’s comments could be interpreted as showing a new openness to a bad idea – substitute prisons.
I know you are here. One of the jails next door is the Twin Towers, which looks like it should be an upscale condominium development, but is actually a jail called and prosecuted very similar to the Men’s Center. It became the district’s 1990s version of a treatment-oriented facility.
As the superintendent finally admitted in 2019, newer jails are not the answer, because the problem is not just old buildings that are failing. The problem is that deputy sheriffs are trained in policing, which is one of the wrong skills and the wrong approach to rehabilitate people struggling with mental illness and addiction, if they have been accused of crimes. Mental health professionals have repeatedly testified that law enforcement techniques such as violent cell extractions typically worsen patients’ conditions and undermine treatment.
The recent history of Los Angeles County is replete with evidence that law enforcement is the wrong approach to psychiatric patients. In the first decade and a half of this century, prisons regularly beat and tortured inmates whose condition was beyond recognition. The Sheriff’s Department has failed so badly to provide mental and medical care that it has had to hand over responsibility to county health officials — but deputies still run the facility and monitor inmates, and overall care remains abysmal.
Just last year, jailers were caught watching porn on the job instead of monitoring the people they were charged with monitoring and helping. Twenty-one people have died in LA County jails this year, 66 since the start of last year. Legal settlements that should improve the situation include one that is nearly half a century old and another that was signed this year, and many others in between.
Of course, safety for many mental patients is needed, especially in the early stages of treatment. No one wants to let a sick person wander alone. But the key is not to turn treatment into a prison as long as medical standards and practices are maintained. Best practices for psychiatric care include “step-down beds,” with higher acuity patients subject to maximum security, continuing over time to increase the level of independence as the patient’s treatment and improvement allows.
To enable step-down treatment, patients must be treated in close proximity to their communities of origin, to which most will return. That means treatment should be provided in small facilities spread throughout the county, not large buildings in prison complexes.
That principle — a network of locked and unlocked step-down facilities, run by medical professionals rather than law enforcement, with contract security if needed — has been part of the county’s primary care plan for years.
The plan is stuck in limbo in part because the Men’s Central Jail population remains too high — about 4,000 people — to close the facility. But the reduction in population that supervisors say is necessary to close the Men’s Center must come from the entire prison system. The county has moved toward that milestone with the help of a successful county diversion program that steers people away from or out of all county jails.
The Office of Diversion and Reentry, for example, provides housing and community care for people deemed incompetent to stand trial who might be sitting in the Twin Towers in the almost futile hope that their situation will improve there. That’s expensive and stupid.
To maximize its success, programs such as ODR need more beds in other communities. This is a political challenge for the Board of Supervisors because of the typical resistance from residents to these types of facilities. But supervisors have moved forward with housing and treatment for homeless people whose profiles often resemble many of the sick people currently in prison, unless they can avoid arrest.
They must remain in it if they are to fulfill their promise to close the dungeon that Men Central Jail and finally break the county cycle of jailing and failing instead of treating and healing.
