LOS ANGELES — For nearly 60 years, Men’s Central Jail has been a stopover for some of the world’s most infamous inmates, including Charles Manson, “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, “Golden State Killer” Lonnie Franklin, and even celebrities such as OJ Simpson and Sean Penn.
Now a “Care First, Jails Last” program adopted by county lawmakers would close the jail with no plans on how to house the population, which are a third of the county’s 12,100 inmates. The most affected would be the 900 inmates with mental health problems.
LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva oversees the world’s largest jail system, and he plans to sue the Board of Supervisors to keep the county’s famous lockup open. The LA County Sheriff’s Department is grappling with a crime surge that includes a 94% increase in murders over the past two years with a $47 million decrease in jail funding.
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“They don’t have the legal authority to do this. They think by removing the budget from us that we will be forced to close the jail,” Villanueva told the Washington Examiner. “But every single inmate is there by orders of the court, so the board has no authority to intervene and release them from custody. They are smoking some strong stuff at the Board of Supervisors.”
Villanueva was elected three years ago and has battled the board throughout his tenure to keep traditional public safety measures, now deemed too harsh by lawmakers, in place. The board has rebuffed Villanueva’s requests for outside counsel, or the funds to hire his own, in order to resolve the jail problem.
“Like all county department heads, you are responsible for operating the Sheriff’s Department within the parameters of the budget,” wrote County Counsel Rodrigo Castro-Silva in a Dec. 28, 2021, letter. “Your disagreements with the Board regarding budgetary matters is not a basis for independent outside counsel.”
Castro-Silva asked Villanueva to “work alongside the Board” to create a “new model of criminal justice policies to offer more effective rehabilitative options and better serve the community.”
Efforts to get the board to reconsider were not successful, and the county chief executive officer was noncommittal in a Thursday meeting. Villanueva criticized the board for claiming to make counseling a platform yet wanting to unleash mentally ill prisoners into the community.
“They’re telling me pound sand — I don’t know what I’m doing,” Villanueva said. “They’re the ones who want to close the only facility with 1,000 single-man cells of the most dangerous inmates in America, but I don’t know what I’m doing.”
The closure could run into pushback from the federal government, which has been monitoring the county jails since 2015 under a federal consent decree. Ironically, it stemmed from a lawsuit arguing a lack of mental health treatment along with excessive use of force by staff.
A certain standard of care for mental health is required, which would be unattainable if the jail closed, Villanueva said. Several federal monitors have noted improved jail conditions over the years in communications with a judge.
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“We have seen substantial improvement in the Downtown jails … and have noted that progress in our reports to the Federal Court,” monitor Jeffrey Schwartz wrote to the board in a Feb. 7 letter. “We believe that substantially reduced staffing in Custody Operations, particularly at the Sergeant level, will endanger the important positive changes that have been achieved.”
