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.
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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)