Last week I got a call from an inmate who is presently incarcerated at Men’s Central Jail—the facility that the ACLU, and actually Sheriff Baca, thinks should be closed for good.
(FYI to those of you new to WLA: as part of my odd-ish professional life, I get regular collect calls from people in various California correctional institutions.)
He’s not in for anything big, a parole violation. He will be out in November, and then I think off parole, hopefully for good.
For his protection, I won’t use his real name. Let’s call him Alfonso Trujillo—Al for short.
Two weeks ago, Al called to say he was in the medical section of the jail. I’ve known Al and his younger brother since both were teenagers. Now he is in his early 30’s. He’s a former gang member turned tattoo artist. But he drinks too much and has awful taste in girlfriends. The combination has occasionally gotten him into trouble. It is low-level trouble, but if you’re on parole, that is all the trouble you need to become a guest of the County.
“Why are you in medical?” I asked, only half listening. I had picked up the phone when I was cooking dinner.
“I jammed up my knee,” he said. “They took me to the General”—-meaning Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, also known as “County General.” “The doctors there took X-rays. They said if it doesn’t get better I might need surgery. They don’t know yet. But it doesn’t seem like it’s getting better,” he said. “It seems like it’s getting worse.”
I began to pay more attention. Al is not generally a complainer.
“How did it happen?” I asked
“I jumped off the top bunk and landed wrong.”
Jumped off the bunk? It sounded like some kind of stupid kid trick. I asked Al to explain.
“Well, because of the overcrowding and stuff, in a lot of the cells they’ve got us in triple bunks. I was in the top bunk. I guess I was half asleep when I was getting down, so I kinda slipped.”
How does one normally get down from a the top bunk of a triple bunk bed? I asked him.
“They’re supposed to have like, little ladders or a step or something, but they don’t,” he said. “So you either have to jump down or you step on the bunks below you. Every time I get out of bed, I go the excuse me route. In other words, I say, excuse me, excuse me, with every step on the way down.”
He paused to make sure I had noticed his witticism.
“But this time, when I stepped on the guy’s bunk below me, his sheet was loose, so when my foot hit it, I slipped, and jammed up my knee.”
At that point the phone line turned static-ridden and then went dead.
(Global Tel Link has the contract with the LA County to provide the jail’s phones. And although the business is astoundingly lucrative, because GTL charges such a premium for the collect calls coming out of the various jail facilities, they seem to have put very little of that money into actually making those phones work—so one is repeatedly cut off.)
Al managed to get through to me a week later, the day after the ACLU held their press conference demanding that Men’s Central be shuttered. “Hey, CJ is all over the news. We saw it here!” Al said. (CJ the inmates’ nickname for the jail)
“How’s your knee,” I asked.
I keep trying to sit in some way that it won’t hurt, he said. “But at least they took me off of the top bunk, and gave me a bottom bunk.”
“Wait a minute. You’ve got an injured knee and they put you in a top bunk?”
Does no one at that place have any freaking sense at all? (I think this last part but do not say it.)
“Yeah, well, I’ve been asking ’em for a week to get me off the top, because there’s no real way for me to get down, you know, without putting pressure on my knee. I guess because of all the stuff on the news, they finally did it. Now I just have to wait to go back to the General Hospital to see if I’m going to have to have surgery.”
Al had always been a lithe, athletic guy and the idea of any kind of physical impairment was worry-producing.
“I think it’d help if they’d just give me a leg brace. The doctor at the General gave me a brace and told me I should wear it. But they took it away from me here because they said it had metal in it. (The jail staff is quite rightly suspicious of anything with metal as it is all too easily turned into a shank.) “I understand that, but they said they’d give me another one right away….and that was a week ago.”
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I spoke about Al’s situation with Mary Tiedeman, jail monitor for the ACLU of Southern California.
She sighed when she heard the story.
“There’s not a lot of communication between the medical staff and the custody staff,” she said. “They speak but they don’t hear. Medical staff doesn’t assign the beds, the custody staff does.” And often the custody staff simply isn’t paying attention.
But how hard can it be to give the bottom bunk to the guy with the bum knee and pronounced limp?
The ACLU has a lawsuit filed about that very issue, Mary Tiedeman told me, referring to Johnson v. the LA County Sheriff’s Department, which charges that LA’s jails engage in “pervasive and systemic discrimination” against those with disabilities.
In Al’s case, of course, the disability is temporary. The injury is not a serious one.
The danger is that lack of appropriate care and treatment could turn a minor injury into a chronic and painful problem.
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PS: I just heard that an attorney from the Disability Rights Legal Center went to see “Al” a few hours after Mary Tiedeman and I talked. I’ll let you know when I find out what comes of it.
More jail and a prison story next week after I double check a few more of the facts.
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PPS: A BIG DAY FOR THE SUPREMES TUESDAY
Adam Liptak has a column describing what SCOTUS asked about the issue of school kids and strip searching.
And the Christian Science Monitor has the rundown on the Court’s decision to nix (in most instances) warrantless searches of motorist’s cars.
(Photo by J. Emilio Flores for the New York Times)
It’s not a secret that jails in California are poorly run and in poorer condition.
You left off something important. What were you cooking for dininer?
I didn’t want to say anything to upset people, so I kept my comment unoffensive.