In the county jails this week it became clear that the prison walls are not a barrier between the violence on the street and the violence behind bars.Ĭopyright © 2006 NPR. Seventy-five percent are affiliated with various gangs at war with each other. According to Merrick Bobb, about 70 percent are either awaiting trial on felony charges, or have been convicted of felonies and are awaiting transfer to state prisons. Prisoners in the county jails are a harder bunch than they use to be. And that, I think, will take away a particularly difficult group of inmates to manage. MERRICK BOBB (Special Counsel to Board of Supervisors): Taking your real high risk inmates, your real violent inmates, some of them are the shot callers within the jails, put them in hard locked cells. Merrick Bobb monitors the Sheriff's Department for the county Board of Supervisors. It's a maximum-security jail with locked cells, not the dormitories that house prisoners in most of the county jails. The most violent ones will be sent to a downtown facility known as the Twin Towers. They're now also trying to separate the most dangerous inmates from the rest of the jail population. JAFFE: The Sheriff's Department is not just separating prisoners by ethnicity. It doesn't make the problem go away, it just makes the problem worse. And every time I keep hearing the same thing, we'll segregate them and that will make the problem go away. EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON (Host, Urban Policy Roundtable): We've had, since 1990, dozens and dozens of outbreaks at L.A. JAFFE: And racial segregation is not the answer, said Earl Ofari Hutchinson who runs the weekly urban policy forum. We want our children that are locked up to come back in the same physical form they wore when they went in. HERRON: We represent the mothers of the murdered children and the mothers of the kids that are incarcerated. JAFFE: Lida Herron was one of several African-American community leaders who called the media, to the backroom of a south Los Angeles coffee house, to talk about what they termed an emergency in the county jails. LIDA HERRON(ph) (Community Leader, South Los Angeles): Good morning, afternoon. And if you only have one or two of these people in a module, and they start fighting with each other, then the racial affiliation code requires all blacks to line up on the side of blacks, and all Latinos to line up on the side of Latinos. County): People from the outside are shot calling to the inside, to Latinos, to start racial disturbances. County Sheriff Lee Baca believes that it's Latino prisoners, and their gang contacts on the outside, that are instigating the fights. Right now, they're getting their wish, as the Sheriff's Department attempts to cool the situation. JAFFE: Latinos outnumber black prisoners two to one, but both groups have asked to be segregated. UNIDENTIFIED MAN (Inmate): You know, when they're around, you know, they're always loud. But that didn't seem likely, listening to this one unidentified Latino inmate vent his feelings towards blacks. The idea was to visit with prisoners in their dormitories, hopefully calm things down. In the morning dozens of ministers toured jails in the North County correctional facility, 40 miles north of downtown L.A., trailed by members of the media. During a week of riots, one inmate has died and many more have been injured.Īnd as NPR's Ina Jaffe reports, authorities still haven't found a way to end the violence. Once again, black and Latino inmates battled each other in spite of the heavy security measures in place. There was more racial rioting last night in the massive Los Angeles County jail system.
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