The closure of Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail will be a herculean task, requiring numerous steps over time to empty the jail population, including total cooperation from multiple county departments and office-holders, according to a county-led report discussed by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Oct. 21.
A report from the county’s Community Safety Implementation Team (CSIT) outlined a three-pronged strategy that would lead to closure of a jail described as outdated and plagued by dozens of deaths each year. The board voted in June 2021 to close the facility without building a replacement and began discussion of its closure in 2015.
The report advocates diverting more people to programs before they reach jail, farming out inmates with substance abuse and/or mental health issues to treatment facilities, and speeding up trial times using better technology such as video conferencing and adding more prosecutors and public defenders.
“There is no date,” said Wilford Pinkney Jr, executive director of the CSIT, adding the report did not give a timeline. “Our directive is not just about closing Men’s Central Jail (MCJ). It also involves building an infrastructure necessary to ensure we have the fewest people in jail as possible for the shortest time without compromising public safety.”
Pinkney’s team laid out numerous data sets and recommendations that will lead to a future timeline in an upcoming report for the closure of the notorious jail in downtown Los Angeles that is run by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
If the old jail can be shuttered, the county will have several next-step options.
First, those who are incarcerated for serious crimes would go to other jail facilities, such as Twin Towers Correctional Facility in DTLA. Second, the 50% of the jail’s population who have mental health issues would go to county Department of Mental Health facilities or to other lockdown facilities with mental health treatment beds. Mental health treatment centers would be scattered across the county, some in existing county hospitals.
The other option is to build a new correctional/care facility to take MCJ’s place.
“This is not going to be fast or easy to implement,” said Pinkney.
In a related matter, the board voted 3-1, with Third District Supervisor Lindsey Horvath the lone no vote, and Fourth District Supervisor Janice Hahn absent, to modernize the Pitchess Detention Center South jail in Castaic. The board voted to spend $10 million on a preconstruction budget. Horvath said the project doesn’t advance the closure of Men’s Central Jail. County officials said it will convert 600 beds for inmates with mental illness and satisfy court orders to improve treatment in county jails.
While the supervisors favor a closure of Men’s Central Jail without building a new facility, that firm stand received pushback from two key countywide elected leaders.
First, Sheriff Robert Luna said he favors closing MCJ but only with a commitment to add a new lockdown facility that he called “a correctional care facility.” It would have a state-of-the-art courtroom hooked up to video and mental health treatment beds. “We need both. Space for our mental health population and for folks remanded into our custody,” he told the board.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman also pushed for building a new, modern jail. “While everyone wants MCJ destroyed, the question is: What are we going to replace it with?” he said. “We need to be talking about that replacement.”
Hochman said he supports moving out inmates into mental health facilities, but only if approved by a judge and it is not a decision that endangers public safety He cited a case where a man convicted of beating his spouse was let go on probation, twice, and ended up putting her in a coma after a third assault.
“However, when the system is putting serious defenders into unlocked facilities, we will oppose them,” he said.
The population of Men’s Central Jail is 13,500 and is estimated to rise to 14,500 people by 2031. Much of the additions are due to inmates held on Proposition 36 charges, CSIT’s report noted. The ballot measure approved by voters and went into effect in December 2024 added stiffer penalties for some theft offenses and drug cases, resulting in more prosecutors throughout the state filing thousands of new felony drug and theft charges.
Besides the jail population rising, a major problem stems from inmates in custody who are awaiting trail. The report found 2,229 people languishing more than one year waiting for their day in court. These are inmates not convicted of any crime.
The CSIT report comes with suggestions for clearing the population, usually matched with three or four times as many hurdles that must be overcome:
• Speed up case resolutions. One way is to erase weeks and months of delays in obtaining behavioral health professionals, social workers and expert witnesses. Also, just getting more defense attorneys will speed things up. But that is made more difficult by recent county budget cuts to the DA’s Office and the Public Defender’s Office. Jail lockdowns, staff shortages and broken video conferencing systems also have added to delays.
• Reduce the numbers entering the jail. This requires more coordination, and more staffing of divergent programs for placement before they are booked and less jail time for probation violations. But many programs have limited funding and staff and they don’t operate countywide. Hence, not everyone eligible get enrolled. To fix this, the county will assess the cost for expanding diversion programs.
• Adding more mental health beds. The county is working on adding 1,000 beds. But that is only a stop-gap measure, county officials said. The extra “diversion” beds will cost $186 million over four years, the report noted.
“We believe community-based diversion options should be funded and expanded to the full extent possible,” said Mark Gale, criminal justice chair for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Greater LA County.