3 Reasons Why the Board of Supervisors Must Say No to the New Jail Plans

The latest version of the proposal to build at least two new county jails at a cost of up to $2.3 billion will again come before the LA County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, May 6.

The proposal was originally presented last month by the Vanir Construction Management in the form of five options, which ranged in price from $1.74 billion to $2.32 billion, and would add between $162 million to $300 million to the jails system operating costs. All of the options involve replacing the Men’s Central Jail, which nearly everyone agrees needs to be torn down.

Specifically, the Vanir plan calls for MCJ to be replaced by a state of the art facility that would primarily provide beds for the 3000 plus mentally ill inmates that, at present, are housed on any given day in the county jail system.

(The plan also includes a partially state-funded new women’s jail to be built at the now-vacant Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster, which is a matter that should likely be considered separately.)

The board members would be wise to turn down the Vanir proposal—or at the very least table it until next year—-for for the following three reasons.

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1. NO LARGE DECISIONS AFFECTING THE COUNTY JAIL SYSTEM SHOULD BE MADE UNTIL A NEW SHERIFF IS ELECTED.

This reason alone should be enough for the Supes to table the plan. The jail overhaul and building proposal before the board is the baby of retired sheriff Lee Baca. Yes, Assistant Sheriff Terri McDonald has signed off on it. But Assistant Sheriff McDonald is not the sheriff.

A new sheriff will be elected in six months (or sooner, if by some wild chance one candidate gets over 50 percent of the vote in the June primary). It is improper to make a decision of this magnitude about the jail system overseen by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, without waiting for input from the person who will be running the department for the foreseeable future.

At Sunday night’s sheriff’s debate moderated by Warren Olney, several candidates, including Bob Olmsted and Jim McDonnell, specifically said that the decision should be put on hold until a new sheriff is elected.

Last week Lou Vince wrote all the board members to explain why he believed the board should wait on its vote until after the election. Vince wrote in part:

...the new Sheriff must take ownership of the final plan and support any decisions made by the Supervisors concerning this issue for it to be successful. It must be born of a cooperative working relationship between the new Sheriff and the Board of Supervisors. To do anything less is to be inconsistent with what all of the candidates for the Office of Sheriff have stated publicly in forums and debates during their campaigns. The candidates support a comprehensive plan to address the festering problems throughout the jail system and have all expressed support for reducing the pretrial jail population and slashing the number of mentally ill inmates. Yet….the Vanir proposal is not consistent with the vision of a reduced jail population.

Olmsted too released a statement last week that called on the board to hold off. “This new plan being discussed by the Board of Supervisors doesn’t address the real issue at hand—and that’s dealing with the mentally ill,” Olmsted wrote.

I believe it’s critical that the Board of Supervisors holds off on dealing with this issue until a new Sheriff is sworn into office. If elected Sheriff, I hope to work collaboratively with the Board of Supervisors to develop a smart, cost-effective plan to tackle this issue while simultaneously ending the corruption and the institutionalized problems within our jails.

McDonnell expressed similar sentiments in Sunday’s debate.

It is also worth noting that, in previous debates, all of the candidates for sheriff including Paul Tanaka, the most law-and-order-leaning of the group, repeatedly took a more progressive stand than the board of supes have taken on the topic of diverting a large percentage of mentally ill inmates away from incarceration.

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2. THE VANIR PLAN FAILS TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM OF HOW TO IMPROVE TREATMENT AND OUTCOMES FOR THE MENTALLY ILL

Theoretically, one of the primary reasons behind this high ticket building plan is to provide better treatment for the 3000 plus mentally ill inmates who, at present, cycle in and out of the LA County Jail system with often disastrous results.

In 1997, the Department of justice expressed concern about how the mentally ill were being treated in the jails, noting that they often failed to get treatment, and were subject to abuse. Then in 2002, the concern grew, causing the LASD to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Justice.

Finally, last year, the civil rights division of the DOJ launched an investigation into abuse in general inside the jails, with a special focus on the abuse and neglect of the mentally ill inside the county’s system.

So what did the board elect to do to address this serious and chronic problem? It hired Vanir, a construction management company as a “consultant” to come up with a plan to address this and other jail issues.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, construction company Vanir recommended building a snazzy new jail (or possibly three jails if you count the proposed women’s facilities)—and offered no plans or suggestions about how to divert the non-violent mentally ill offenders to appropriate treatment facilities, rather than simply locking them up in a nicer environment.

Yet bizarrely the Vanir proposal claimed the construction plan, if instituted, would reduce recidivism among the mentally ill and would satisfy the memorandum of understanding with the Department of Justice.

“There’s a tremendous amount of research that shows that incarceration for people who are mentally ill is contraindicated,” said Southern California ACLU legal director Peter Eliasberg. “So the idea that simply getting a newer, cleaner building is going to make any significant difference in the outcome for mentally ill inmates is ridiculous. The jails are still going to be run by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department not by the Department of Mental Health. Inmates are still not going to get the treatment they need. And why do we think that a new building is suddenly going to give us a new and better culture in the los Angeles Sheriff’s Department? It’s a preposterous idea.”

LA Superior Court Judge Terry Smerling agrees. In an Op Ed that appears in Monday’s LA Times, he wrote:

The supervisors are right that something should change. The U.S. Department of Justice has condemned the treatment provided to inmates with mental illness in L.A. jails. These inmates cycle in and out of lockups, often for petty violations related to their mental illnesses. But building a massive new “treatment jail” is the wrong approach to solving the problem.

As a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge with more than 31 years on the criminal bench, I am all too familiar with what happens when people with serious mental illness get caught up in the criminal justice system. I have seen firsthand that jail is an inappropriate place for many of the mentally ill defendants who end up there. Being incarcerated is likely to exacerbate mental health problems and to increase the likelihood that inmates will commit new crimes upon their release.

Instead of spending large amounts on a better jail experience for them, we should spend money on local treatment programs that would keep low-risk offenders with mental illness out of jail.

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3. DIVERTING NONVIOLENT MENTALLY ILL OFFENDERS TO APPROPRIATE COMMUNITY TREATMENT HAS WORKED FOR OTHER COUNTIES

Both San Francisco and Florida’s Miami-Dade counties have instituted successful diversion programs for the non-dangerous mentally ill who previously would have landed in jail.

Miami-Dade’s program in particular holds promise for LA to examine before we rush headlong into a gigantic capital expenditure that no mental health expert suggests would produce substantively improved long term outcomes for the mentally ill in the county’s care.

For example, Miami-Dade’s misdemeanor diversion program has reportedly reduced the offenders’ recidivism rate from 75% to 20%. And their felony diversion program dropped the recidivism rate to 6%.

San Francisco had equally dramatic outcomes with its diversion programs.

So why is LA so intent on persisting with its outmoded and expensive lock ’em up strategy?

In recent a letter to the LA’s Board of Supervisors, Dr. Terry Kupers explained a little about the two courses that the Supes have open to them: the high-ticket Vanir construction plan, or a combination of more modest jail construction and a robust and well-planned diversion program.

(Kupers is a psychiatrist and mental health expert who, in 2008, wrote an extensive report about the mistreatment of inmates with mental illness in the LA County jails.)

Here’s an excerpt from Kupers’ letter:

…Diversion does not mean “a slap on the wrist.” Not at all. Rather, very rigorous and well-targeted treatment and rehabilitation programs require conscientious effort on the part of participants while addressing the problems that put individuals at risk of being arrested. And diversion is safe. There are locked residential units and mechanical devices such as monitoring ankle bracelets for the minority of individuals who need close supervision in the community. There is quite a lot of expertise in the mental health and criminal justice communities on designing diversion strategies that provide the needed treatment while maintaining safety in the community.

The options Vanir Construction presents offer a much bleaker outcome. Because of the focus on punishment in jail, and because of the institutional dynamics themselves, and with likely future budget shortfalls and staffing shortages, “mental health jails” tend to become holding facilities for inmates with mental illness who remain in their cells or dormitories and take high doses of medications, which on average, tends to stifle their initiative and make them all the more likely to continue their treatment non-compliance and possibly criminal activity after they are released.

Let us hope that, on Tuesday, the supervisors think the matter through carefully and act wisely.

We’ll let you know what happens.