In the August issue of Governing Magazine, John Bunton (author of the excellent, LA Noir) has written a highly intriguing—and hope producing—article about how, as Bunton put it “…America’s reddest state—and Mississippi’s most notorious prison—became a model of reform.”

(Good journalism comes from interesting places these days.)

The reform was triggered by a tough-minded and passionately determined ACLU lawyer named Margaret Winter, and brought into being by an unusually courageous head of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, a guy named Christopher Epps.

But here’s the kicker for those of us in LA. After the success of the unlikely and politically risky reform process in Mississippi, Margaret Winter told Buntin she is next setting her sites on the Los Angeles County Jail System.

I’ve spoken to Winter in the past about conditions in LA’s Men’s Central Jail in particular and I know her to be extremely well-informed—and quite dangerous to bureaucrats and the status quo when riled.

Okay, now here are some clips from Buntin’s article. The whole thing is a fast read and a good one, so I recommend reading it all.

In January 2002, Margaret Winter, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Prison Project, received a letter from Willie Russell, an inmate on Mississippi’s death row.

“I am on a hunger strike to the death,” the letter began. In highly idiosyncratic language, the letter then described conditions at the facility where death row was housed, Unit 32.

Unit 32 was one of seven prisons located on Mississippi’s fabled penal institution, Parchman Farm. As described by Russell, it was also a lot like hell. Inmates were locked in permanent solitary confinement. In the summer, the cells were ovens, with no fans or air circulation. Russell’s was even worse: He was in a special “punishment” cell with a solid, unvented Plexiglas door. The cells were also sewers, thanks to a design flaw in cellblock toilets that often flushed excrement from one cell into the next. Prisoners were allowed outside — to pace or sit alone in metal cages — just two or three times a week. Inside was a perpetual dusk: One always-on light fixture provided inadequate light for reading but enough light to make it hard to sleep.

Then there were the bugs. The only way to avoid being eaten alive, Russell wrote, was to wrap himself in clothes like a mummy, which made the brutal Delta heat even more unbearable. Worst of all, though, was the noise. Psychotic inmates screamed through the night. Conditions were so bad, Russell continued, that some dozen-odd other inmates — about one-quarter of Mississippi’s death row population — had also joined the hunger strike.

“I had heard this sort of thing before,” Winter says, “but I was gripped by the power of this letter. It was like something out of the Book of Genesis. It had a biblical grandeur to it. And I believed it.”

[LARGE SNIP]

…..And so the scene was set for a classic — and wholly predictable-showdown, one pitting an idealistic civil liberties organization against a beleaguered corrections system.

Except that in the case of Mississippi, that’s not what happened. Instead, in 2006, Sparkman’s boss, MDOC Commissioner Christopher Epps, decided to do something very different: He invited the ACLU in. Shortly thereafter, Epps and Sparkman began a series of deeply counterintuitive reforms that risked their careers.

Epps didn’t just take on Parchman Farm. He also challenged Mississippi’s commitment to a punitive penal code that had doubled the state’s inmate population and tripled its corrections budget in 10 years time….

PERSONAL NOTE TO MR. CHRISTOPHER EPPS: How do you feel about a move to California? Sure, the state’s broke and LA has a teensy, weensy traffic problem. But we’re a fun group, and—all in all—we’ve got a great city (and state). (Honestly, the taco trucks alone are worth the move.) So com’on down. We….um…need you.

UPDATE:

The LA Times has an editorial about the Mojave cross decision. It begins like this:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday sent a simple — and disturbing — message in a complicated ruling about an 8-foot cross in California’s Mojave National Preserve. The message is that the government can treat the preeminent Christian symbol as a national emblem and display it on public property.

Here’s the rest.

On Wednesday, in a 5/4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the much squabbled over cross, erected years ago on federal parkland in the Mojave Desert, may stay. The cross was originally put up to honor war veterans but, for years, it has been a symbol of disagreement over the sometimes ill-defined boundary between church and state.

Here’s more back story.

Although the ruling to some degree split along the usual political lines (5/4 with Kennedy the swing vote), it was nonetheless a decision that pretty much split the baby and gave no one faction exactly what it wanted.

For instance, this is what the LA Times reported:

In a shift away from strict church-state separation, the Supreme Court gave its approval Wednesday to displaying a Christian cross on government land to honor the war dead, saying the Constitution “does not require the eradication of all religious symbols in the public realm.”

Speaking for a divided court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the 1st Amendment calls for a middle-ground “policy of accommodation” toward religious displays on public land, not a total ban on symbols of faith.

And CNN added:

But even among the conservatives who voted to allow the cross to stand, there was strong disagreement about how similar disputes should be settled, an indication of the contentious nature of church-and-state cases.

And here is the opening of what the Wall Street Journal had to say.

It ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

What else to say about the Mojave Desert Cross opinion, handed down on Wednesday by the Supreme Court? The case could have been a contender (to quote Brando in ‘Waterfront’): it had a vivid factual setup and a great legal question concerning the separation of church and state.

But the Court on Wednesday handed down a fractured opinion with a less-than-riveting impact: the court kicked the case back to the district court for reconsideration. Even Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of the plurality opinion, conceded the case wasn’t exactly a blockbuster. The case, according to Justice Kennedy, made no “sweeping pronouncements” on the line between church and state….

As is often the case, one of the best and fullest reports on what the court did on Wedenesday comes from NPR’s Nina Totenberg.

The ACLU of So Cal along with two other groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of students at three of the city’s worst-performing middle schools contending that students were denied an adequate education.

At first bounce the suit seems a bit squishy. I mean, every city and county agency has been hit with layoffs and dreadful cutbacks. But we’re out of money people!

AND THEN YOU READ THE FINE PRINT and you understand why this suit is important and why, despite his appalling personal failings, John Edwards had it right when he talked about Two Americas.

Jason Song, at the LA Times has the rest of the story. Here are some clips:

The last round of L.A. Unified teacher firings led to chaotic conditions on some campuses that made learning nearly impossible, especially at Samuel Gompers, Edwin Markham and John H. Liechty middle schools, according to a complaint filed by the ACLU, Public Counsel and Morrison & Foerster. Between half and three-quarters [italics mine] of the teachers at those campuses were laid off last year, according to the class-action lawsuit filed in L.A. County Superior Court.

Because of a steep budget deficit, L.A. Unified officials issued thousands of layoff notices last year and are expected to order more this year. Citing state law, school districts typically dismiss teachers on the basis of seniority during budgetary shortfalls.

The cuts were especially devastating to Gompers, Markham and Liechty because administrators had recruited younger instructors who wanted to teach in the inner city. When those teachers were dismissed, they were often replaced by instructors who did not want to work in tough, urban schools, the suit alleges.

Many positions were also difficult to fill, so schools turned to substitutes, according to the lawsuit. Some of those teachers allowed the classes to turn chaotic or were unfamiliar with the subject matter. Several substitutes allegedly gave every student a “C” grade because they didn’t know the material well enough to grade students….

Read on.

LA TIMES REPORT ON ABUSE IN JUVIE PROBATION LOCK-UPS PROMPTS ACTION—MAYBE

In the wake of the LA Times report on staff abuse of young inmates within LA County’ juvenile probation facilities, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas called for expansion of the Probation Department’s internal affairs staff.

Well that’s a start. Let’s hope there’s some follow-through.

And don’t forget, the LA Times report is the beginning, not the end of the problems.

CUTTING PRISON PROGRAMS HURTS US ALL

The Sacramento Bee’s guest column by Orson Aguilar articulates why the state should reject its penny wise and pound foolish plans to slash its rehabilitative prison programs.

The $250 million that California is about to save by slashing vital rehabilitation programs for prisoners will cost us many times that much money.

The money we think we’re saving will cost us many times over in more crime, more drug abuse and ruined lives.

Rehabilitation and alternative programs can save lives. I know. One of them saved mine.

I grew up in Boyle Heights, a rough section of East Los Angeles, in the 1980s. Poverty, gangs, drugs and violence plagued our community. But I was lucky enough to stay out of most of it — until one night, at age 19, I did something stupid.

A friend and I were attacked by a group of teens. In the struggle, I fired a shot from a handgun, scattering the crowd but striking one of the assailants in the forearm. Luckily, he was not seriously hurt. My friend and I also escaped with only minor injuries.

But I was charged with a felony. My friends urged me to fight the charges on grounds of self-defense. Instead, I took responsibility for my action. I pleaded guilty to felony assault with a deadly weapon.

Read the rest here.

ACLU’S RAMONA RIPSTON ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT

The ACLU’s longtime and extremely respected director, Ramona Ripston, has announced that she will retire a year from now. Ripston was the first woman to hold a leadership position in the organization. Some of her accomplishments include:

…Ending segregationist policies at the Los Angeles Unified School District, helping to spur meaningful reform in the, for years, notoriously hard-headed LAPD, fighting successfully for voting rights for Latinos, and providing leadership in battles for equal rights for the disabled, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and the homeless.

“Ramona Ripston has spent her entire career giving a voice to the voiceless,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. “With the ACLU of Southern California as her megaphone, she worked tirelessly to protect the constitutional rights of the poor, disabled, homeless, and gays and lesbians, among many others….”

Yep, that’s about right.

All of us who live in Southern California, owe her a huge debt of gratitude—even those who have opposed her. We have all of us benefited beyond calculation from her passion and her commitment to our collective humanness.

SENTENCING PROJECT LAUNCHES NEW WEBSITE

Anyone interested in justice issues likely knows the Sentencing Project.

They have just launched a new website that is replete with great new interactive features. Reporters and others with criminal justice-related research needs, take note.

LA County, like the state (and the city of LA) has big budget problems. So to help shrink his budget gap, Sheriff Lee Baca has plans to close one of the county jails—in particular North Jail Facility at Pitchess Detention Center, which is a part of the sprawling jail facility located up near to Six Flags Magic Mountain.

There are two problems with this plan.

1. Closing a jail will increase the already intense overcrowding in the county’s jail system.

2. More importantly, the North Jail facility, which houses 1600 men, is—according to the ACLU—the wrong jail to be shutting down.

I agree.

The jail to close is the very troubled and dangerous Men’s Central Jail, the place the ACLU has been pushing hard to have shuttered . Baca himself called for Men’s Central Jail to be closed last February, saying that the jail has “outlived its time.”

More than that, it’s filthy and perilous. Apart from budget problems, CJ needs to be bulldozed.

As the ACLU points out, there are alternatives:

“Because Los Angeles County has to be serious about saving money, given the current economy, the Board of Supervisors should commit to developing alternatives to detention that reduce jail populations and treat many detainees more effectively without any increased risk to public safety,” said Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

A comprehensive pre-trial release program that makes use of electronic monitoring, supported housing, and drug and mental-health treatment programs could be adopted at a fraction of the cost of jail. And because countless studies have shown that these programs reduce recidivism and the risk of new offenses, they do far more to protect public safety than a brutalizing jail stay.

I think Sheriff Baca would actually like to make use of some of these suggestions. Maybe the state and county’s budget meltdowns will give him some of the political cover he needs to do so.

The LA Times has more.

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(MORE POSTING LATER THIS MORNING)

The rowdy Lakers fans who rampaged through the streets around Staples Center on Sunday night couldn’t have picked a better time to test the LAPD: It was the eve of a federal judge’s hearing on whether to extend the consent decree

Officers handled with restraint several situations that could have gone ugly: rowdy crowds trying to tip over police cars, trashing an MTA bus and looting a gas station.

Nicely done. The peaceful outcome certainly made for a better day for police brass trying to persuade Judge Gary Feess to do away with federal oversight of the department.

Feess, of course, sounded reluctant to abandon his oversight, and asked for more information before making a decision.. Read Celeste’s posts of a week ago urging the judge to surrender his control and return the LAPD to the LAPD. The ACLU thinks otherwise, and here’s a statement from staff attorney Peter Bibring after today’s court hearing:

“We are pleased the court recognized the progress the LAPD has made but focused on the larger question at hand: Whether it’s appropriate to lift the decree when the department has not complied with all of its terms most importantly the non discrimination provisions.”

“Over the past years, the consent decree has been the engine for LAPD reform, so as not to repeat the nightmares of Watts, Rodney King and Rampart. With the monitor’s finding that the department has not yet fully complied with the decree—including specifically its policies and practices toward communities of color—now is not the time to prematurely terminate what is working to bring order to our city. When it can be confidently said that citizens of color are not overstopped, overfrisked and overarrested by the LAPD for no other reason than their race, it will be time to end the decree.”

Who can blame the judge for wanting to see all the reforms in place before surrendering control? On the other hand, maybe there’s some room for compromise. What if Chief Bratton vowed to stop endorsing candidates for city offices?

Parker Center would be a better place without such blatant pandering and politics. Not only would he avoid the embarrassment of having endorsed Jack Weiss for city attorney, but it would certainly help his relationship with the victor Carmen Trutanich.

Those of us who remember the not-so-distant past when the police secretly investigated political foes will be happy to see the chief disengaged from the political process.

How ‘bout it chief: You can tear up the consent decree if you keep your ballot choices to yourself.

Monday afternoon, federal judge Cormac J. Carney decided he had completely had enough with the FBI’s repeated refusal to fork over the details of the surveillance of Muslim leaders and organizations that the Feds have been conducting since shortly after September 11.

The ACLU has been trying to get the files for the past three years, but they have been stonewalled. So U.S. District Judge Carney stepped in yesterday and ordered the FBI to turn over to him about 100 documents that detail the bureau’s surveillance of So Cal Muslims.

(One million Muslims live in California.)

Judge Carney further told the bureau to conduct an immediate search of all its offices nationwide for documents relating to the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Greater Los Angeles (CAIR) and its executive director.

Instead, the agency has provided redacted versions of reports that have heightened suspicions among the Muslim communities in LA and in Orange County that even the most apparently innocuous events are being monitored.

One would have hoped we were beyond all this J. Edgard Hoover crap. But one would be wrong.

On March 30, a 22-year-old man named John Horton was found hanging from a noose in his cell in Men’s Central Jail—or CJ as it is known to inmates and their families and many in law enforcement.

John Horton had been in jail for over a month. He was waiting to be shipped off to fire camp where he was to serve two years on a drug possession charge. As a nonviolent, low-level offender without a pile of priors Horton was eligible for program that allows inmates to learn elements of wildland firefighting.

Yet, for reasons that no one has yet adequately explained, for the entire duration of Horton’s time in CJ, Horton had been kept in solitary confinement in a a dimly lit, windowless, solid-front cell the size of a closet.

The cell was around 5 X 7 feet, said Margaret Winter, the head of the ACLU’s national prison project, when we talked on the phone about Horton’s case yesterday afternoon.

Winter, who has seen many cells in her professional life, said that Horton’s cell was so dimly lit that reading would have been difficult or impossible. “And there was nothing else in the cell. It was a room with no desk, no chair.” Only a cot, sink and toilet and a cement floor. This meant that Horton was left in the room for hours and hours on end, seeing no one, talking to no one, reading nothing, receiving none of the prison programs. Glimpsing no sunlight. For hours, and days and weeks.

********

By the time deputies found Horton he had been dead so long that rigor mortis had set in. “How long was he in there? He’s very stiff!” the prison paramedic reportedly remarked to the officers. The man in the cell next to Horton began taking frantic notes immediately after the young man’s death, just to make sure that someone had a record of what had happened (a page of which is pasted above).

In the days before his suicide, wrote the inmate/witness, Horton showed many signs that he was a man in serious trouble. For one thing, he had tied a noose tied to the back of his light fixture in his cell and hanging in plain sight.

“I seen it. They seen it. Mr. Horton visibly stood in his cell and/or squatting atop his sink with plastic ties around his wrist and looking directly at the noose (several deputies observed these “items” and ‘behavior’ when taking me or bringing me back they brought me back from the law-library)…”

Horton stopped eating, refused his meds, began talking to himself.

The witness also said he told staff that Horton needed help, but he observed no help or intervention given.

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THE DANGEROUS JAIL

At a 9 a.m. press conference on Tuesday, the SoCal ACLU’s Melinda Bird talked about Horton’s case as emblematic of the conditions in LA’s Men’s Central Jail that have become so intolerable that they actually drive men crazy. “We are urging the Board of Supervisors to address the conditions in Men’s Central Jail because the conditions are medieval and drive men mad,” said Bird at the press conference. “Even the sheriff agrees that the only way to fix Men’s Central Jail is to close it.”

At the same time, the ACLU released a 50-page report by Dr. Terry Kupers, a national expert on prison and jail medical health care. The report detailed what Kupers called intolerable conditions inside CJ.

Bird said that the ACLU commissioned the Kupers report and submitted to Sheriff Lee Baca last year. But after months of negotiations with the sheriff’s department didn’t lead to any substantive changes, the ACLU decided to release the report publicly. Horton’s death was the final tragic trigger.

(The report itself may be accessed here. And an LA Times summary of the report’s findings by Richard Winton may be found here.)

Among other things, Dr. Kupers found that few activities or programs and massive overcrowding at the jail leads to violence, victimization, custodial abuse and ultimately psychotic breakdown even in relatively healthy people.

“We’re talking about very urgent conditions.the ACLU’s Margaret Winter told me. In addition to the tomb-like cells, the CJ is drastically overcrowded because—among other reasons— the overburdened state prison system is offloading anyone it can to the County jails.

“And it’s no longer tolerable to say, ‘We’re working on it,’” Winter said. She talked about the damage that occurs when inmates are kept in what amounts to solitary confinement in the jail for months at time. “Conditions like this exacerbate existing mental illness and can bring on a pre-existing condition that had previously been hidden.”

That may have been what happened with John Horton…..

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(TO BE CONTINUED WEDNESDAY….. in DANGEROUS JAILS – PART 2: The Death of the Mamma’s Boy)

Monday the Los Angeles County Supervisors voted to allocate a maximum of $500 grand to conduct a two year study as to how the LA County Jail can deal with its overcrowding.

Before you freak out at the price tag, trust me, this is a good thing. Our LA County Jail system is the largest in the country and arguably one of the most dysfunctional simply because the ghastly overcrowding is a recipe for ongoing disaster.

There’s a saying among guys who’ve spent time in California’s prisons: if you can make it in the County, you can make it in any prison in the country. Even experienced cons consider LA County Jail to bethat dangerous and chaotic.

If it ain’t safe for the inmates, it’s not great for the deputies guarding the inmates either.

(And remember, a huge percentage of the people in spending their nights in LA County Jail have not been convicted of anything. They are awaiting trial.)

With the pressure on to reduce the state prison populations, this will mean more low-level lawbreakers kept at a local level, thus the jail overcrowding is only likely to get worse. So this is one of those instances where it’s wise to spend money in order to save more in the long run.

The study will be conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice—very smart people in general, but also the group that got hired to do a nearly identical study for the New York City jail system. Then when NYC had the good sense to follow most of Vera’s recommendations—Presto!—-the city managed to lower its jail pop by 30 percent.

Of course it is that last sentence above that is the key. I have no doubt that Vera can do the job—even though LA’s jail system presents a tougher challenge than did New York’s. But will LA have the intelligence and the huevos to follow whatever reasonable recommendations the Vera folks make? Let us hope so.

“Los Angeles County’s criminal justice system is so backed up that many people are stuck for months in the jail, although they pose no risk to public safety, simply because they are too poor to make bail,” said Melinda Bird, ACLU of Southern California’s senior counsel. (The So Cal ACLU is the court-ordered monitor for LA County Jail system.) “Although these pretrial detainees are presumed innocent, the overcrowded conditions in which they are housed expose them to extreme violence and harsh and degrading conditions that violate all constitutional minimums.”

My smart pal Frank Stoltz of KPCC also has this story.

On Monday the ACLU released a report stating that a significant percentage of LAPD officers are still engaged in racial profiling. The Police Protective League, predictably howled that the study—which was conducted by a guy named Ian Ayres at Yale—had it entirely wrong. (“Dr. Ayres is trying to manipulate existing data to prove what 9,700 individual officers are thinking when they make traffic stops—which is an exercise that might work on a spreadsheet at Yale, but doesn’t work on the streets of Los Angeles.” Blah, blah, blah. Hey, we understand. It’s the union’s job to support the troops.)

And LAPD Chief Bill Bratton said the study was bogus (or words to that effect) because it was based on figures that were much too old.

He had something of a point. Ayers and company analyzed upwards of 700,000 cases in which Los Angeles Police Department officers stopped pedestrians and/or drivers—but the figures came from between July 2003 and June 2004.

Ayres and the ACLU would have liked newer data, they said, but they were unable to wrench it away from the department.

Now Dr. Ayres has volleyed the ball back at his critics with an excellent Op Ed in this morning’s LA Times.

In it he challenges LAPD Chief Bill Bratton to let him do a brand new racial profiling study, but for the cops themselves this time, not for the ACLU—and using the departments most recent stats.

Here are some clips from Ayers’ Op Ed.

The study, which I wrote with my research assistant, Jonathan Borowsky, asked not simply whether African Americans and Latinos are stopped and searched by the LAPD more often than whites — it’s clear that they are — but the more complex question of whether these racial disparities are justified by legitimate policing practices, such as deciding to police more aggressively in high-crime neighborhoods.

We found persistent and statistically significant racial disparities in policing that raise grave concerns that African Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles are, as we put it in the report, “over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched and over-arrested.”

[SNIP]

Now consider this: Although stopped blacks were 127% more likely to be frisked than stopped whites, they were 42.3% less likely to be found with a weapon after they were frisked, 25% less likely to be found with drugs and 33% less likely to be found with other contraband. We found similar patterns for Latinos.

Not only did we find that African Americans and Latinos were subjected to more stops, frisks, searches and arrests than whites, we also found that these additional police actions aren’t because of the fact that people of color live in higher-crime areas or because they more often carry drugs or weapons, or any other legitimate reason that we can discern from the rich set of data we examined.

Police Chief William J. Bratton quickly rejected these findings, primarily because the study used data that was more than 4 years old. This is a fair point. But we had no other choice: The department has not released the more recent stop data that it has been collecting, nor has it analyzed the more recent data to test for racial disparities. If Bratton is truly confident that unjustified racial disparities are a thing of the past, he should be able to show the change in the current data. I would be happy to organize a group of respected academics to help analyze it.

I was talking to Connie Rice the other day, and she mentioned that, while Bratton and the LAPD brass were really quite enlightened these days (and I would agree), she didn’t think the enlightenment had filtered down to the majority of the rank and file on the street. What did I think? Yes and no, I said. I think it has for some, not so much, for others.

We talked about the excellent officers we know….and those who fall in the still-needs-improvement catagory.

“I wish someone would study the issue and find out,” she said. “We need to ask how much the department has changed at a street level. And how much does it still need to change?”

A comprehensive racial profiling study with full access to all the departments’ facts and figures would take a giant leap the direction of answering Connie’s question.

So, how about it, Chief?

(But let’s get those rape kits done first.)