The numbers in L.A. County are staggering, leaders say:
- 9% of the population is black, but blacks comprise 29% of people in county jails.
- Hispanic or Latinx people make up 49% of the population, but they are 52% of the county’s incarcerated population.
- Black and Latinx women are 49% of the county’s population are women. But they make up 75% of the women in the county’s jails.
All this in a massive incarceration system leaders say is a relic of another era, destined only to be more costly and less healthy for the county over the long run.
That’s why a seismic shift in L.A. County’s jail system is coming, if a team of leaders and community advocates see their vision realized.
That vision will be a focus on Tuesday as the Board of Supervisors considers approving “Care First, Jails Last,” a county roadmap that seeks to make incarceration “a last resort,” and puts treatment — whether it’s mental health or battling addiction — ahead of it.
The goal? Stopping what officials say is a “pipeline” that keeps pushing generations of people into the region’s criminal justice system, with devastating results for communities and families.
On paper Tuesday, leaders will look to approve the roadmap and its 114 recommendations to make it happen.
But in a larger sense, at stake, leaders say, is whether the county becomes a leader in criminal justice reform or goes status quo with a system in which 30% of the entire jail population has a serious mental health disorder and 60% of the people released from that system every day have a “significant substance use disorder,” according to the report, which reporters got an early look at on Monday, prepared by the County Work Group on Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI).
The group, a coalition of private, community advocates and public leaders, who have worked over the last year to come up with 114 recommendations to make incarceration a last resort in the largest jail system in the U.S. and “imprisons more people than any other nation on earth.”
“The eyes of the nation will be watching L.A. County as we try to transform a system defined too often by jail bars and barbed-wire fences and a law enforcement response to a community-based system of care responses where care and service comes first and jail is absolutely the last resort,” said Dr. Robert K. Ross, President & CEO, The California Endowment, who along with his 25 members representing county agencies and departments, advocates and community leaders developed the visioning document.
Ross called the document part spiritual statement, partly a moral statement, and partly a strategic statement — in the sense that the group’s report emphasizes that actually treating people’s mental health and addition problems instead of throwing them in jail is a less costly alternative for society.
The group’s 114 recommendations — many of which were shifted into gear six years ago as the board’s composition changed — were folded into five broader strategies for the county to double down on:
- Expanding the scale of holistic services in the county. Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas, a co-author of the motion with fellow supervisor Sheila Kuehl, envisioned a network of “restorative villages,” where instead of jailing people, a court could send people for treatment, perhaps at large reusable county properties.
- Instead of law enforcement responses for people experiencing mental health problems, the report suggests more behavioral interventions.
- More pre-trial release of detainees who would otherwise be incarcerated.
- More treatment services as an alternative to jail time, including time at hubs such as “sobering centers.”
- A focus on eliminating racial disparities.
Ridley-Thomas focused on racial disparities that the county cannot get around under the current system, while also honing in on issues related to homelessness and incarceration.
“You can’t talk about this issue of incarceration, you can’t talk about the issue of homeless, without dealing with the issue of racism head on, and that’s what this support seeks to do,” he said.
The goal, when it comes to race, officials said, is to break a cycle that jails the most vulnerable populations in the county — which often are marginalized, often people of color. In that cycle, an arrest, and subsequent jail time could have devastating impacts, including homelessness, for people, their families, their friends. Officials say many of them can be treated in another way, according to the document.
It wasn’t clear how such a massive institutional and cultural change would be paid for. Officials said much of the institutional push is already happening, but Ridley-Thomas said it needs to happen on a much larger scale. Money exists for such an initiative, but local leaders would be looking to state and federal sources, too, officials said.
Los Angeles residents booked into the L.A. County jail come mostly from five zip codes, representing South Central L.A., Compton, Long Beach, and the Antelope Valley, according to the group’s report, noting that those zip codes “do not benefit from access to the same amenities and opportunities that exist in other zip codes such as places of employment, schools that provide a variety of academic and extra-curricular options, neighborhood parks, etc. In turn, it is little surprise that persons being booked into the jail most frequently report their employment status as “unemployed.”
And the cycle goes on, officials said.
Officials did not say that jails aren’t needed. But Ridley-Thomas and Keuhl said the question is, how can creative alternatives to incarceration will have an impact on the planning of any future jail-like facilities, including what to do with Men’s Central Jail, which two years ago the board voted unanimously two years ago to spend $2.2 billion to replace with a combination clinic and jail facility.
Ridley-Thomas envisioned more rapid building of “restorative villages” than jails in the future, given the sheer cost and complexity of doing that.
“We do intend to replace men’s central, because it’s a mess,” Kuehl said. “But with what? We haven’t gotten enough consensus on no jails at all. So what we’re trying to do is analyze, well, what is a jail for, and therefore what do you construct if you do need to incarcerate people? For how long and for what?”
Consideration of the matter is set for the Board of Supervisors meeting, 11 a.m. Tuesday, March 10, at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, 500 W. Temple St., Los Angeles.
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