[csusbpeace] The LA County Jail Has Been Chaining Mentally Ill Men to Chairs for Days
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- Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2022 06:05:02 -0700
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2022/09/la-county-jail-mentally-ill-abuse-sheriff-alex-villanueva-aclu-complaint/
<https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2022/09/la-county-jail-mentally-ill-abuse-sheriff-alex-villanueva-aclu-complaint/>
The LA County Jail Has Been Chaining Mentally Ill Men to Chairs for Days
Add this to the list of scandals plaguing Sheriff Alex Villanueva.
The men's intake center at the Los Angeles County jailACLU court filing
As a criminal justice reporter here at Mother Jones, I get emails and letters
every week detailing the horrific conditions at correctional facilities. But
when I read one about what’s been happening at the Los Angeles County jail,
the biggest jail in the country, my jaw actually dropped open.
The jail is overseen by Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who is up for reelection in
November, and is at the center of several scandals
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/05/los-angeles-county-sheriff-election-alex-villanueva>,
including his resistance to ending his department’s “deputy gangs,” or
cliques of officers with matching tattoos and names like the Executioners and
Grim Reapers.
“The conditions I observed in the ‘clinic’ were appalling.”
In recent years, the jail has seen an influx of men arrested with mental
health problems—and it doesn’t have enough special beds to accommodate them.
As a result, some of these men are being chained to chairs in the jail’s
intake center for days or even a week at a time, waiting for a bed to open
up, according to a new legal filing
<https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/rutherford-v-villanueva-plaintiffs-memorandum-support-application-temporary>
by the ACLU. Sometimes jail staffers aren’t letting them up to use the
toilet, so they are forced to defecate and urinate on themselves and on the
floor, in trash cans, or in the juice boxes they are given to drink. They are
allegedly denied showers afterward—as well as access to their medications.
Many sit with their shirts pulled over their heads, trying to block the
fluorescent lights after days without proper sleep.
County officials did not deny this is happening, after ACLU attorneys
complained in court. “Lamentably, Plaintiffs are largely correct that
conditions inside the Inmate Reception Center of the Los Angeles County Jail
have deteriorated dramatically in past months,” the county’s attorneys wrote
in a court filing on Monday, admitting that men were handcuffed to chairs for
long stretches of time, and not refuting allegations about poor access to
toilets and showers. Men “have been held in that space for well beyond 24
hours while waiting to be assigned to housing designed to accommodate their
needs.”
Men handcuffed to chairs in the intake center
ACLU legal filing
How did things get so bad? The LA County jail system isn’t just the biggest
in the country; it’s the biggest in the world, incarcerating upward of 14,600
people this month. Its male intake center processes thousands of individuals
each week, the vast majority of whom have not been convicted of a crime but
are awaiting trial or other legal proceedings. And in recent years, the
number of them with mental health problems has grown considerably because Los
Angeles County, like others counties around the country, has failed to invest
enough money in mental health care and community alternatives to
incarceration. Last year, about 40 percent of the jail’s total population had
a diagnosed mental illness, compared with about 27 percent back in 2012.
A few thousand of these detainees are sick enough with suicidal thoughts,
mood problems, or psychotic symptoms that they must be placed in special
housing units with extra observation from staff; the number who are eligible
for the highest-observation units alone has grown from 460 in 2012 to 1,577
today, according to county data. They are supposed to be placed in these
units after no more than 24 hours in the jail’s intake center, which does not
have beds or other basic accommodations. But these special housing units are
“in short supply,” the county’s attorneys wrote in the court filing, which
means that people recently have been forced to wait much, much longer.
On a single day in August, a whopping 252 people had been stuck in the men’s
intake center for longer than 24 hours; many had been there for several days,
or even a week. Wait times increased over the summer, after the Los Angeles
Superior Court ended a statewide, pandemic-era order about bail schedules
that had decreased the number of people that could be jailed before they went
to trial. While most of the men in the intake center are allowed to move
around as they wait, some with serious mental health symptoms are handcuffed
to chairs. On that same day in August, 22 people had been chained for more
than three days—significantly longer than the limit of just two or four hours
recommended in most jail policies nationwide, according to the ACLU filing.
When ACLU attorneys visited the intake center in June and August, they
observed shocking conditions. Dozens of people tried to sleep while chained,
and hundreds of others slept on floors and metal benches, often surrounded by
trash. Nobody had mattresses or blankets. “I ache all over,” Curtis Howard,
one of the detained men, told the attorneys in the center four days after he
arrived there. “It is so uncomfortable I sleep only an hour or two at a time.”
Handcuffed men “yell for the deputies to unchain them so they can go to the
bathroom. But the deputies ignore them, so they urinate on the floor.”
He added that some of the handcuffed men “yell for the deputies to unchain
them so they can go to the bathroom. But the deputies ignore them, so they
urinate on the floor.” Even men who could walk around struggled to use the
toilets, because they were overflowing, and instead urinated in sinks—making
it hard for others to quench their thirst. “There is no water,” Ira Porter,
another detainee, told the attorneys. “The sink is nasty and smells like
urine and feces and stuff is floating in the water.”
One man said that while he was tethered to a chair, another handcuffed man
next to him defecated on the floor, and it was not cleaned for two days.
Multiple men told the ACLU they were not allowed access to showers or fresh
clothes; one man was denied a shower even after defecating on himself. “The
conditions I observed in the ‘clinic’ were appalling,” Peter Eliasberg, chief
counsel at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said in a declaration
to the court. He and his colleagues were informed that jail staffers hardly
ever cleaned, except for prior to the ACLU visit. Even then, one attorney
observed a man in a suicide gown lying on the floor in the middle of a puddle
of urine.
Men in the intake center also allegedly struggled to get medical care,
according to the ACLU filing. Some were abruptly forced to stop their
psychotropic or chronic care medications, while others detoxed from drugs or
alcohol with little oversight or assistance. One man who said he was an
insulin-dependent diabetic told the ACLU he had not received insulin for 36
hours and had been fed only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and orange
juice, which made his blood sugar spike and crash. Another man with a peanut
allergy said he did not receive any alternative to the peanut butter
sandwiches for breakfast and lunch.
The attorneys saw a man in a wheelchair crying while holding up his hands,
showing how they were curled up and swollen, and another man with a
fist-sized hernia, hunched over in pain. “I am hearing voices and I feel like
I am falling apart,” said Chuck Bethel, who was abruptly taken off his psych
medication for bipolar schizophrenia. A psychiatrist in the center allegedly
told him he could not get his medications until he received his housing
placement. “I have been crying on and off since I have been here…I was
thinking about suicide but don’t want to tell anyone because if I do they
will chain me to a chair.”
In April, a man was discovered unconscious in the center and died even after
receiving emergency aid. In June, another man died after two days in the
center without a medical evaluation.
“It is like a living hell in here.”
County officials told the court this week that they had recently taken steps
to address these problems, including relocating other detainees who were
already admitted to the jail, to open up more special housing units for newly
arrested men with mental illnesses. These changes led to a decrease in wait
times in the intake center over the past couple of weeks, the officials said.
They added that newly arrested men are allowed to shower right before they
enter the intake center, and that they undergo a medical screening at the
center. “The purpose of tethering a person to the [chairs] is to ensure the
person’s safety, and…to ensure that custody staff are able to continuously,
directly observe all those who pose a high risk of self harm,” the attorneys
wrote.
The county officials told the court that they would follow a proposed
temporary restraining order prohibiting them from holding anyone in the
center for more than 36 hours, with the goal of keeping people there for no
more than 24. The order would also require officials to provide documentation
to the ACLU anytime someone was handcuffed, chained, or tethered to chairs
for longer than four hours.
A judge is expected to rule on the restraining order on Friday. But without
drastic changes, it seems likely that people will continue to suffer in the
intake center. “It is like a living hell in here,” Gilberto Perez, another
detainee, told the ACLU attorneys. He did not have access to his asthma
medication, so his breathing felt labored. He was exhausted and said he had
slept just three or four hours over nearly as many days. “The deputies treat
us like animals and don’t give two shits about us.”
The Sheriff’s Department clearly has a lot of work to do to improve the
jail’s conditions. And yet as the midterms approach, its officials appear
rather distracted by other matters
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-14/l-a-county-supervisor-sheila-kuehls-house-search-by-sheriffs-investigators>:
This week they accelerated investigations, even after prosecutors declined
to press charges, into two of Sheriff Villanueva’s political enemies,
including a county supervisor and a member of a civilian oversight commission
who previously criticized him and called on him to resign.
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