Judge blasts inmate care

Judge blasts inmate care

By Beth Barrett Staff Writer
Whittier Daily News

Los Angeles County faces tens of millions of dollars in damages for bedding thousands of prisoners on mattresses on concrete floors after a federal judge tentatively ruled Monday the practice violates the constitution and is symptomatic of serious problems in the riot-plagued jail system.
U.S. District Court Judge Dean D. Pregerson said the practice pointed toward an "endemic problem" in "dysfunctional" facilities where overcrowding is commonplace.
"There is something inherently wrong with what is happening at the institution when it reaches a level where so many \ sleep on the floor," Pregerson said from the bench.
Pregerson gave lawyers for the county, and Stephen Yagman - representing inmates sleeping on floors, who he estimated at up to 300,000 - time to make additional arguments before a final ruling.
Floor sleeping was ended last September as some additional facilities were opened to provide more bunks, in addition to letting some inmates convicted of misdemeanors out early, said Marc Klugman, chief of the Correctional Services Division.
The class action lawsuit - which Yagman said could reach damages of $100 million if the ruling becomes final and more members of the class make claims - comes as the county's troubled jail system has faced a series of recent riots, mainly between African-American and Latino inmates.
Sheriff Lee Baca has announced he's looking for $300 million from the county to reopen Sybil Brand Institute, hire more deputies and to make other changes in the system to stem the violence.
Klugman said "the system was hard hit" by a string of bad budget years that forced facilities to close, adding to the overcrowding and floor sleeping.
An injunction against overcrowding in the jails, indicated by floor sleeping, has been in place for nearly three decades, and recently was redrawn to prohibit repeat floor sleeping by inmates - but has never been challenged in court.
Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, applauded the ruling.
"There shouldn't be any floor sleepers," she said.
Yagman said he took the class-action case after inmates who had gotten out of jail complained of their treatment, and that the names of about 24,000 inmates were collected between May 29 and Sept. 29.
In court, he said the issue is one of "human dignity," and that floor sleeping is a "degradation of people that deprives them of their dignity," in violation of due process under the 14th Amendment.
"There has been a pattern of deliberate indifference; they throw up their hands and say, `We can't fix it,"' Yagman said. "They can't do that, they have to be responsible."
Yagman said the county could resolve much of the problem and save "a fortune" by moving convicted inmates to state prison more quickly.
Klugman denied there are transfer delays, saying state-bound inmates usually are moved within a couple of weeks.
David D. Lawrence, an outside counsel for the county, urged the judge to reconsider, arguing that "overcrowding by itself isn't unconstitutional," and that there must be corresponding findings that factors like poor health or unsafe conditions also exist.
"It's not an issue of numbers; this is the largest jail \ in the country," said Lawrence, with the firm Franscell, Strickland, Roberts & Lawrence. "It doesn't follow that because there's a lot of them, there's a single constitutional violation. I don't think the court can look at it that way."
beth.barrett@dailynews.com