Los Angeles County jails are so dangerous that deputies, to control the enemy, have become the enemy. Like any other gang members, they try to inspire fear and strike first. Joshua Sather, a rookie who graduated at the top of his class in the Sheriff’s Academy, was assigned to the section of Los Angeles’s Twin Towers Correctional Facility reserved for the mentally ill. Housing fourteen hundred inmates on any given day, it’s now the largest mental institution in America, except it’s not a mental institution. It’s a storage facility. According to Sather, in March 2011 his supervisor ordered him to beat up an inmate. It’s not clear whether he obeyed, but the next day Sather quit. He left town and found a job at an oil field in Colorado. Sather is one of the few deputies to come forward about gratuitous staff violence, but the department investigation of the March 2011 incident concluded that nothing incorrect had occurred. After the media learned about the case and similar cases that ended without any findings of deputy guilt, Baca reopened them.7
In 2010 I sat through a series of hearings in superior court in Torrance, California. In one such hearing, deputies brought in a young inmate from Baca’s jail who’d been charged with possession of heroin with intent to sell. His head was terribly swollen and disfigured, bruises everywhere. He looked as though he’d fallen off a scaffold and landed on his face. Only a week earlier, I’d seen this same man looking unscathed. The prosecutor and Judge Mark S. Arnold had also been present for both hearings, and in the second one, the inmate sat in full view of everyone for a full ten minutes. But Arnold, the prosecutor, the bailiff, the court secretary, and the judge’s assistant all seemed quite determined not to notice the glaring rearrangement of his face. They performed business as usual without mention of the startling change.
After the hearing, I mailed Arnold a note and commended him on his ability to ignore what he clearly didn’t want to see. Judge Arnold, like so many criminal court judges, was a former prosecutor. He had also served thirteen years as a deputy in the Sheriff’s Department. No doubt he worked part of that time as a county jail guard, as do all rookie deputies. After receiving the note, the judge, I would learn later, did in fact contact the jail to ensure that the man received medical attention. Among his injuries was a cracked orbital bone surrounding one eye. The inmate was informed that eventually he’d need surgery. He would later try to interest civil attorneys in helping him file a lawsuit against the county, but they uniformly said they had learned of many similar instances within the jail and had grown selective. They would take only cases involving disabling injuries, the kind that would never heal.
Later I found out what had happened to the inmate. In the jail, a cauldron of racism, gangs form around ethnicities. The principal groups are Hispanic, white, and African American, although there are subsets, such as Salvadoran Hispanics and skinheads. When racial tension in the jail is high, which is most of the time, the guards can prevent confrontations by keeping the groups separated. If a man uses the wrong toilet, walks in the wrong location, stops in front of the wrong TV, he’s asking for punishment. Inmates even shower in ethnic groups, and therein lies the tale.
One day the inmate, who was white, was sent into the shower room, beyond the vision of the deputies, with another white man and six Hispanics. After the shower, back in the changing room—also outside the deputies’ view—the six Hispanics jumped the other two. They fought back but sustained a number of bad injuries. Later, when questioned by an investigating deputy, all eight inmates, as the investigator knew they would, said they didn’t see or know anything about the incident, and the investigation ended.
The two battered inmates didn’t even consider the six Hispanics as being responsible for the beating they meted out. “They only did what they were supposed to do,” the white inmate told me. He and the other inmate had been set up by the deputies in charge, possibly because of a personal grudge or possibly because they were bored. Officially, the jail administration doesn’t sort inmates by race because the practice is illegal. Unofficially, if they didn’t, there would be homicides and mayhem every day. Because they’d followed official race-blind protocol instead of the rules of the jail’s parallel universe, the deputies knew they would never be disciplined.
Most incarcerated people, whether in Los Angeles, Chicago, or any other U.S. town, were accused of crimes that involved no violence. Yet, if they remain behind bars for any length of time, they will be taught both to expect violence at any moment and to solve problems through violence. It’s not that American criminals are more vicious than criminals elsewhere. Rather, American penal institutions are more likely to allow violence to rule. The guards are more likely to let the strong prey on the weak and forget about what they’ve seen when they go home to their families.
The millions of ex-cons now walking the streets were conditioned to stand up for themselves to avoid ending up at the bottom of the food chain, with the raped, the beaten, and the lost. This lesson was provided by the justice system, and it’s yet another reason—along with poor literacy, widespread drug addiction, and other social ills—that successful convicts don’t generally turn into successful citizens. They’re likely suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, the same psychological condition that afflicts so many war veterans.
Although the prison-industrial complex is economically tiny compared to the military-industrial complex, prisons and jails have a far more profound effect on the nation than ledgers might show. More people are in prisoners’ uniforms than military uniforms. In fact, the number of people locked up or on parole or probation—more than 7 million—is larger than the number of residents in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts combined. In the most recent available figures from the Department of Justice, 713,473 prisoners were released from incarceration in 2006.8 The fashions and attitudes of prison—drooping trousers, for example—are so prevalent among the population at large that it’s not always easy to know the source. Did street gang violence invade prisons, or did prison violence take over the streets? Because America made the choice to incarcerate so many people, their convict ethos is all around us.
A corporation, according to the Citizens United ruling by the Roberts court, is a person, but the 2.3 million people behind bars are, in many ways, not even equal to the three-fifths of a person that was the sum of a preemancipation slave. Although they’ve sunk to the bottom of the U.S. socioeconomic structure, they aren’t counted when statisticians put together the numbers on unemployment, housing, or income. Before their arrests, many were jobless and some homeless as well, but on landing in the Gulag, they were miraculously cured of socioeconomic ailments, which makes the nation’s maldistribution of income and assets look less odious than it really is. These nonexistent people can, however, be counted when numbers are run to determine representation in Congress, the Electoral College, and the state legislature. Although they probably hail from an urban area, they are often counted as residents of the rural town where the prison is located, boosting that district’s population.
The New York Times estimated in 2008 that 5.3 million felons and ex-felons would be barred from voting that November.9 Although they boost the voting power of prison districts, they, like slaves under the Constitution, get no share of this power. It’s a remarkable contortion for a democracy.
Many prison systems, aided by obliging judicial interpretations of statutes, have unilaterally altered court sentences by placing so-called troublesome inmates in solitary confinement, often for years and possibly even for life. In 2005 the Bureau of Justice counted 81,622 prisoners in “restricted housing” (solitary confinement).10 Their ailments are so predictable that psychiatrists have given them a name—security housing unit (SHU) syndrome. Symptoms include a variety of anxieties such as severe depression, hallucinations, and paranoia.