The L.A.County Men’s Central Jail: Day Zero

January 31, 2021 by J. Nelson

The on again, off again initiative toward bulldozing this municipal black site might finally be realized.

In 2014, when the LA County Board of Supervisors turned their attention back to the city’s contemptible Men’s Central Jail (MCJ), demolishing it was a given. A civic corner had been turned, taking all plans to update and expand the existing structure off the table. There could be no escaping the curse of a bloodthirsty culture of deputy-on-inmate violence that lived deep in the building’s bones: the miserable concrete labyrinth had to come down.

Yawn.
The lockup built in 1962, and often referred to as “the old side,” continues to rot in place. Former Sheriff Lee Baca has since been convicted, but the facility itself is still overseen by the Custody Operations Division as atrociously as ever. Equally troubled Alex Villanueva likely runs it with as much “Us vs. Them” spite than during my own 10-month stay as a pre-trial prisoner under then-Sheriff Sherman Block (at the time America’s highest paid public official).

But as Americans rethink their positions on criminal justice, LA’s Men’s Central Jail should be seen as both worst-case and day zero.

First, the worst.
Secrecy has long permeated the ranks of LA Sheriff’s Brass and enshrouds MCJ. It’s such an organizationally controlled fortress, only touring an aircraft carrier can compare. Murals, tributes, trophy cases, banners, badges, and memorials force feed visitors law enforcement martyrdom to the point where one can’t sense how much it’s all spinning until reunited with fresh air and sunlight.

The Department has managed for decades a kind of denial sleight-of-hand involving its budgets, bad apples, excessive force settlements, corruption scandals, secret deputy gangs, and a conveyor belt of civil rights violations and allegations of misconduct. There’s always an excuse as to why it’s “not the right time” to close MCJ’s old side, hold the LASD accountable, or discuss ways to reduce corruption, even as 539 of 606 lawsuits against the city in fiscal year 2018-19 were filed against the Sheriff’s Department alone. (And to the tune of $81.5 million). In the end, this shell game of postures and pushback has prolonged the life of their beloved Men’s Central Fight Club.

• Department Leaders had a lax attitude towards deputy aggression and discouraged deputy discipline
• Department was aware of deputy cliques present at MCJ and known to high level management as far back as 2004
• The Sheriff allowed his Undersheriff and Assistant Sheriff to run the Custody Division without effective oversight
• Deputies Have Enabled Inmates to Use Force Against Other Inmates
• Witnesses have told the Commission that deputies enabled inmates to attack other rival inmates by opening the doors to several cells at once, which inmates refer to as “racking the gates.”
• The Commission also heard about deputies who have intentionally placed inmates in dangerous situations, such as placing high-security inmates in the general population and announcing their crimes to the other inmates.

In the current climate, the future for reform looks a bit brighter. Still, it’s unclear what will actually become of MCJ. Zócalo’s Joe Matthews makes a case for keeping the old dungeon around, perhaps as a museum of mass incarceration or a center for democratic principles in action. “To tear down Men’s Central Jail would be to risk forgetting what the place has meant, and to miss a historic opportunity to turn this torture chamber into a vital center for California’s future,” he writes. Conversely, there is an optimistic view among many Angelenos that the very act of destroying MCJ could usher in a new era of transparency for the historically corrupt Sheriff’s Department. Perhaps by reclaiming the vital downtown real estate MCJ occupies, the thinking goes, the LASD can be shaken of its worst impulses and elements, allowing its more reform-hungry and youthful professionals to elbow their way to the fore.

At minimum, the County Supervisors voted last year to cancel a $1.7 billion expansion of the facility into a Supermax on steroids. That little project–– now thankfully also off the table–– was being referred to as the “mental health jail” (talk about a jinx). Sights are now set on a sprawling campus of support housing, drug diversion and reentry programing, and the critical mental health and addiction recovery services that would comprise a true Restorative Justice Village.

Phase One was approved in September and includes the Vignes Project, aka “Hope Village,” a predominantly CARES Act-funded $48-million bridge housing facility artfully made of shipping containers. Planned for rapid construction in MCJ’s industrial backyard, the idea is to begin diverting the city’s growing homeless population away from incarceration, where it’s 60-100% more expensive to detain those with mental health or substance use disorders. A second Chinatown property once intended for MCJ parking is also slated for an affordable or supportive housing development. As part of the LA Board of Supervisors’ new “care first, jail last” policy, Hope Village may someday swallow the LASD complex altogether.

So could MCJ, the “The Abu Ghraib of Los Angeles,” home of the heroin burrito, be swapped out for a recovery university and support shelter?

Ha! It’s better than the idea I had back in 2014, when I proposed that the whole karmic Superfund site be turned into a mall. Hey, I’m optimistic too, but with how little we thought of criminal justice reform, disenfranchised and forgotten citizens, immigrants, and any further legwork to achieve racial justice, a custody-themed Cellblock Shopping Town is what I thought we deserved.

It still will be if we ––and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors–– let this chance to turn a corner pass us by.

For a historical perspective on the LASD’s excessive use-of-force in its jails and failure to discipline rogue officers, check out: L.A. County Sheriff’s Department: A Report by Special Counsel James G. Kolts & staff, 1992 –– and this Los Angeles Times Story Gallery

Nursing Covid-19 in Prison

January 11, 2021 by J. Nelson

Couldn’t care less about “criminal scum”? Then how about one of your heroes – of the frontline healthcare variety?

Among the key findings in a September 2020 report from The Council on Criminal Justice is that COVID-19 infection rates for inmates are four times higher than for the general public. Mortality rates are double. As of last summer, prisons in America accounted for 19 of the top 20 clusters of confirmed Coronavirus cases in the United States.

For real time California numbers, check out the Los Angeles Times’ Coronavirus tracker, currently providing updates of cumulative cases, new cases, and deaths by day.

As one who envisions the redirection of adult offenders rather than the mere recycling of them, I urge you to absorb the statistics, detention hotspots, and death counts while imagining the heart and hope that is suspended amidst the ongoing disqualification of those in custody.

The world is a place where nothing is guaranteed, clearly. But since prison is a smaller, simpler microcosm of society, the loss of goal-oriented trajectories, guidance, and rewards in custody is intensified. For many prisoners and detainees with hampered coping skills and emotional and self-management challenges, there are little or no real diversions as exist elsewhere. Coronavirus kills these aspirational programs even quicker than people as infection safeguards are enacted.

Adding insult to injury is what I call bonus justice, by which the incarcerated are treated as eligible for additional hardship and dismay just because, “You’re here, aren’t you?”

But maybe you see the incarcerated as “criminal scum,” and these things don’t offend your humanity. Fine. How ’bout healthcare workers? You like frontline heroes? Think they’re worth something? Then let’s talk about a prison nurse, one who’s been a friend of mine for years.

This particular nurse earned her credentials with the tenacity and dedication of an astronaut in training. I remember her long hours and that pain-in-the-ass car in which her commute was endured. I was surprised when she announced just over a year ago that she’d accepted a nursing position in a men’s prison, and I admire her for putting need above judgment.

At present, my friend is facing the risk of COVID-19 transmission every single day, and she does so in an atmosphere of fiercely elevated environmental, personal, and psychological vigilance. The emotional and cognitive burden she carries would simply snap many of the rest of us — and that’s without Coronavirus-related fears. Prison is a minefield of rules to remember, and protocols are substituted as abruptly as security requires. Sure, my friend can leave each night, but she’s no less subjected to the righteousness of an amped-up military chain-of-command than are the badges and bad guys. How “at home” could she be with barbed wire, gate buzzers and barking men in her head?

Additionally, as citizens, we use our values and principles to judge each other, with courtesy and manners acting as referees. On the prison yard, philosophies and integrity just square off. In the aftermath, it’s up to whoever’s left standing to pester someone behind a fortified walk-up window for a band-aid. Meanwhile the dread and the aggressive energy of gang ideation never lets up. The cartoonish yet unfunny macho posturing is woven into her work-language, as are minute-to-minute suspicions and charity-killing levels of bureaucracy.

On an average day, this is just some of what my nurse friend has to shake off during her (long) drives home. Now she has the danger of bringing COVID home with her, too. How many of these tensions have morphed, I wonder, into corrosive strains of their own by the time she pulls into the driveway?

There have been 139 reported Coronavirus deaths among prison staff, but since testing information is sporadic and not all states release info on prison employees tested for COVID-19 – these critical frontline workers are forced to speculate, trade rumors, and hope they’re being given the straight story. In that way, at least, they’re just like inmates they serve.

“The nurses are so behind because there are soo many medical emergencies,”

UPDATE:

Los Angeles Times front page – January 13th, 2021:
“The nurses are so behind because there are soo many medical emergencies…”

No Excuse For Insufficient Backups…

December 28, 2018 by J. Nelson

Between my hosting company, WordPress, and yours truly, every last one of this year’s blog entries went missing about two weeks ago and has yet to be recovered. Have I been fed a string of “complicated” excuses? Yes, but…

This is due in part to my not having backed things up for a while, so in terms of returning the missing content to the site, I have only myself to blame. I have no excuses, but neither do I have any reason not to continue. So I’m working to redesign and update the site for 2019 in the hope that whereexcusesgotodie.com may remain a worthwhile visit.

I was recently bitten by a dog for no discernible reason: nasty one too. I went to the hospital and everything. I’d just been cruising down the sidewalk when a big retriever shredded my pants and started gnawing my thigh before its owner even realized what was going on. If only its leash had been a little shorter. When I encountered a similar looking dog few days later, synapses in my brain fired in the direction of my crossing the street, but I didn’t. I forced myself to walk past the dog despite the pinch of anxiety I felt.

Data loss feels like an existentially inexcusable dog bite. I was mad at first, then self-pitying, but in no way do I intend to surrender this humble platform.

Now then! As far as 2018’s Excuse of the Year, well, here ‘ya go:

“Our system has been pushed to a breaking point by those who seek open borders…Smugglers, traffickers, and their own parents put these minors at risk by embarking on the dangerous and arduous journey north.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, after 2nd child dies in U.S. Border Patrol custody.

No way, Nielsen. Regardless of how they came to be in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a law enforcement agency you oversee, Homeland Security is responsible for the care of its detainees. There’s no excuse for negligent healthcare anywhere in the American penal system, whether through ICE or in privately owned jails and prisons funded by American taxpayers.

Enjoy, and I’ll see you in 2019 with an Excuses site revamped and ready to rout chintzy rationalizations.

Upselling Prison #4

July 14, 2017 by J. Nelson

A former inmate sizes up detention products, #4 in a casual series.

Accessories, upgrades, add-ons, telecoms, toilets, and the first responders of the detention supply industry.

It’s a dubious distinction, I know, but I’ve been among the first 75 inmates to populate a brand new prison. The place hadn’t even been “officially” opened and it wasn’t entirely complete; it took months for the technological marvel it was said to be to actually function as designed. But while Where Excuses Go to Die (the book) can tell you a lot more about that story, today we return to those particular design elements and specialized detention products that represent modern mass incarceration in America. Unlike previous editions, this time we’ll look at just one pressing problem: inmates who stop up cell house toilets and the wastewater control systems that swallow every dinner, document, dictionary, and domino thrown at ’em.
Read more

Smart Prerelease Instruction: Inmates Helping Inmates

May 4, 2017 by J. Nelson

The double-edged-sword of getting out of prison.

For those of us who follow incarceration and reentry issues, the inmate-created, inmate-run, prerelease program in Cumberland, Maryland, that was just approved by the Federal Bureau of Prisons will be something to keep an eye on.

Ideally, Young Men Incorporated (YMI), as the program is known, will prove that switching from curriculum enforcement to the much more coercive power of wisdom and teachable moments is the right way to reinvent prisoner reentry methodology.

Hitting your release date and getting out is a trip. Individual results may vary, but when it comes to civilian employees, frontline custody personnel, and prison administrators, soon-to-parole inmates often face disparagement and placating attitudes. The way some Badges see it, you’re still a criminal, soon to be protected by rights that weren’t there a couple of weeks ago. More than a few are just waitin’ for you to act special, by which I mean individual. Read more

Life in a Prison Classroom

March 29, 2016 by J. Nelson

I know life in a prison classroom, and the learning environment you may or may not find once you’ve taken a seat.

A brief click-through of “5 Projects to Watch in 2016” from Correctional News leaves me wondering how much prison officials really know about the obstacles inmates face just getting through a detention facility’s classroom door. What does it matter, you ask? Well, in an era where words like “reform,” “rehabilitation,” and “recidivism” are on everyone’s lips, it’s important to know when a component as critical as education is simply being given lip service.

Correctional News covers prison operations, design, and construction. It celebrates grand openings and groundbreakings because imminent completion dates tend to matter to rubber mattress merchants, vendors of detection products, and shower flooring suppliers.

Currently showcased are the East County Detention Center near Palm Springs, for example, which is set to open in 2017, the Kern County justice facility in Bakersfield, and the new Utah State Prison, among others. California being where I paid my debt to society, I tend to monitor its prison system more closely than I do others. But all of these entries have something in common, and that’s my point: they feature anemic descriptions of the education facilities also under construction. Rehabilitation-as-footnote here, will eventually make corrections administrators and state officials look as though they’re simply hanging wreaths of rehabilitation on freshly painted classroom doors and leaving it at that. Read more

A Felon, Just Like Me

February 13, 2016 by J. Nelson

Having written fundraiser remarks for disgraced LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, and having been big-bro bear-hugged by him after confessing to teleprompter typos, it’s hard to hate the man who ran a law enforcement mafia.

He hugged me because he was relieved to be offstage. Fifty-cent words weren’t easy for Baca, I’d been warned, and this was a big night. Just before he’d taken the podium, I realized I’d failed to yank one word in particular, and sure enough he flubbed it. Regardless of how I felt about his Men’s Central Jail deputies — or anything else related to that American flag-wrapped night at the Beverly Hilton — I was the show writer. I had to tell him it was my mistake, not his. Read more

Let’s Talk about Package Thieves

October 3, 2015 by J. Nelson

Abandoning skanky mattresses and furniture are hate crimes, and package thieves are cut from the same cloth.
These rats need skewering.

Few things get under my skin as much as abandoned, humped-on furniture, but package thieves come pretty close. And, ’tis the season for these losers to come out of their pain med stupors long enough to use what semblance of societal normalcy they possess as a cloak for their cowardice. Like this guy, who literally takes his toddler out of its stroller to make the kid grab someone’s package.

But guess what, dummies? Here’s where your excuses go to die, ’cause what the hell will you have to say for yourselves when you get caught? Read more

RELEARNING REENTRY ISSUES

March 12, 2015 by J. Nelson

Learning prisoner reentry issues means relearning prison.

If we don’t resist the manner in which we’ve been trained to recognize incarceration and the incarcerated, offenders will only continue to be recycled through the system rather than redirected.

Americans need to unlearn prison and relearn life behind bars, but not because prison reform is a growing national dialogue: bandwagons produce hot exhaust already. We need to be reeducated because our understanding of the poor coping skills, pressure, and PTSD faced by those emerging from detention has been the stuff of movie jokes for as long as any of us can remember. Mutated by Hollywood and put off by unpleasantness, most Americans can’t get past convict caricatures to see key subtleties that must become part of our awareness. And I do mean ours: taxpayers, you, me, and Law-abiding Larry — not just the social workers we usually leave to resolve issues of recycling vs. redirecting.

Following my own successful parole, I never expected to become a prison commentator or a conveyor belt of questions about confinement, but I can never seem to escape the little strings in life that lead back to my experiences behind bars. Each one returns me to lessons learned “inside” that now take civilian form on a daily basis. In fact, those lessons accompany me so doggedly, I’m constantly comparing in-custody versions to civilian values and principles. Witnessing inmates upholding the same rules they utterly failed to live by “outside” was and remains fascinating. At the same time, it makes sense that a closed culture like the one behind bars would enforce a rapid and uncompromising assimilation process. Read more

Upselling Prison Pt. 2

November 17, 2014 by J. Nelson

A former inmate sizes up detention products, #2 in a casual series.

Upselling Prison: accessories, upgrades, add-ons, and salespersons of the detention supply industry.

Norix Inc. claims it doesn’t just make prison mattresses: it makes “Comfort Shield® Remedy Mattresses.” And if cost equalled quality, Comfort Shields would clearly be a cut above. But ask anyone on the inside, and a prison mattress is a prison mattress is a prison mattress. They’re subject to the worst an infected wound has to offer; and they get clutched, twisted, and chewed on like nobody’s business. For something that has more prayers whispered into it than Israel’s Western Wall and all of Islam’s worry beads, nothing has less to show for it than a prison mattress.

It’s kind of tough to wrap your head around trading a pair of shoes (or several meals) to obtain a less “raped” one, but it’s what you do. Otherwise, as we once heard an intake sergeant say to a complainer, “it’s mind over mattress.”

Fortunately, distinguishing bloodstains from even less pleasant discolorations gets easier after, say, month three. But the marks inmates leave behind aren’t limited to bodily fluids or semi-solids: prisoners love writing gang names, anti-Semitic messages, zip codes, and their sweetheart’s initials on the very bedding into which your tears will be absorbed.

Naturally, these handwritten hieroglyphics can be more indelibly printed onto older cotton mattress covers than the newfangled, vinyl laminate “wipe ‘n cleans,” so these days one needs to make sure his ink has dried before drifting off to dreamland. While most ink dries quickly, sweat can often reactivate it, and entering a chow hall wearing gang signs on your face that are only decipherable by the fellas planning a hit on “those fools” after breakfast is really something to avoid. And trust me, you’ll want to take the time to check for swastikas drawn in magic marker by the guy before you. The rule is: read your mattress first and watch where you put your face.

For the record, endlessly violated (and absorbent) cotton mattress covers are actually preferable to the newer sealed plastic pads – unless you enjoy marinating in your own sweat at 3:30 in the morning. Besides, wipe ‘n cleans get weird blisters that make you wonder how your body heat could have caused mystery chemicals to churn and gurgle beneath the vinyl.