LA County’s jail replacements on the table

Discussions about incarceration dilemmas are back in the Los Angeles County spotlight.

There have been plenty of conversations and back-and-forth planning in regard to providing infrastructure for both iron-bar criminals and mentally ill residents in the nation’s most populated county: 10.16 million residents counted in 2017.

As 2019 winds down, here are the pertinent actions taken or voted down.

In January, the Supervisors discussed moving forward on the upgrading of the women’s jail at the Mira Loma facility on the Southeast corner of Avenue I and 60th Street West in Lancaster. But they ended up voting “no” on the proposal.

Family members also met their counterparts — other families with incarcerated loved ones. They shared stories of mistreatment, indignities and injustice. They organized and successfully advocated for civilian oversight of the Sheriff ’s Department, which runs the jails.

The ACLU of Southern Cal- ifornia had long criticized the building of new jails and had lobbied for diversion — out of the criminal justice system entirely — of people dealing with mental illness or who otherwise didn’t belong behind bars.

In an editorial on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the supervisors may have finally got the message in 2019.

Here are the problems they face:

Should officials deal with a rapidly expanding population of mentally ill men who are in dire need of treatment but are held in jail because they have been accused of crimes?

What is to be done about the overcrowded women’s jail that was structured for men and was not set up for young incarcerated mothers to receive visits from their children?

The platitude solutions that were discussed for decades involved tearing down Men’s Central Jail in downtown LA, moving the general inmate population into the adjacent Twin Towers jail, which now houses mentally ill inmates but offers insufficient clinical space, build a new stateof-the art treatment-oriented jail for the mentally ill, and rebuild the Lancaster site as a new campus-like women’s jail facility.

The discussions suggested that the new jails would be more humane and better designed. Mental health treatment would be better. Inmates, sheriff’s deputies, physicians, nurses and visitors would be safer. The projects were reviewed because funding was available from a state program and from local financing.

There was a lack of enthusiasm but contracts were signed and builders were lined up.

The supervisors convened a planning group to propose alternatives to incarceration, made up not of attorneys and academics but also of activists and, crucially, people who have lived through and survived the criminal justice system from the inside.

Although approval of the proposals may pose a political risk for the individual supervisors, they appear to have embraced the challenge and may move forward on the issues, according to the Times editorial.

These situations are extremely destructive to the people who need the care and to their families.