For the first time in two years, Los Angeles County has stayed in compliance with a court order requiring it to address overcrowding and horrific conditions inside its Inmate Reception Center, the entry point for the county's jail system, for six consecutive months.
County officials have called the milestone a "critical landmark" in their efforts to improve the facility. Officials now say they have dramatically reduced the amount of time individuals spend in the IRC before they are shifted to other facilities and sped up access to medical and mental health screenings.
"This milestone represents a significant step forward in improving conditions at the IRC and protecting the rights and well-being of those in our custody," Sheriff Robert Luna said in a statement. "While we celebrate this progress, we must remain focused on the persistent challenges within our jail system. The lack of sufficient specialty housing for those who enter the jail system with significant medical conditions, substance use disorders, and mental health needs continues to be a growing concern and a serious threat to our compliance efforts."
The ACLU filed an emergency motion asking for a judge to intervene in September 2022 after seeing what it described as "abhorrent conditions" during visits to the facility. Individuals suffering from medical and mental health conditions were chained to benches for hours or even days at a time and not provided with the medications they needed. Others were stuffed into dirty, overcrowded cells where they had to defecate in trash cans and sleep on cold, trash-covered concrete floors.
When the county failed to initially fix the conditions, the ACLU asked a judge to find the county in contempt.
"It used to be that any time someone came into jail, they would spend the first several days of confinement in these horrific conditions, violating their constitutional rights the moment they stepped foot in the L.A. County jail facilities," said Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California. "Thankfully, that is not the case today."
The county and the ACLU eventually agreed to a stipulated order in June 2023 that would prevent the county from holding anyone in the IRC for more than 24 hours and from chaining inmates to benches or other objects for more than four hours. It also required the county to increase the number of psychiatric staff and available treatment beds.
Conditions began improving almost immediately, Camacho said, but until this year, there were points when the population of people cycling through IRC would spike, particularly during big holidays, and the county would fall out of compliance once again.
"Before we brought the enforcement motion, there wasn't a six-month period of time in which IRC didn't devolve into a place where people were languishing and not having their basic needs met," Camacho said. "It has been a total upward trend since June of 2023 and now there's been six months of almost spotless compliance with the orders of two years ago."
The county has implemented a wristband system to better track how long someone spends in the intake process and retrained its staff on the legal requirements to process individuals quickly. It has also expanded mental health services and embedded more psychiatric staff, prioritized staffing, increased the number of cleaning crews and sanitation checks, and offered bonuses to retain correctional health services employees.
The county reported a 61% reduction in the number of people waiting for transfer to state prisons and an 80% decline in those waiting for transfer to state hospitals as a result. Nearly 2,000 additional treatment beds have been added through the Office of Diverse and Reentry and the Department of Mental Health, more than originally required by the order.
"We recognize that this is a long journey, but these milestones are making meaningful improvements in the day-to-day experiences of inmates and staff alike," said Maggie Carter, chief DOJ compliance officer for L.A. County, in a statement. "Departments are achieving these gains despite significant challenges and are working hard to build on this momentum to fulfill our other obligations and deliver much-needed change to the jails."
Camacho, the ACLU attorney, applauded L.A. County's progress at IRC and said she hopes it will be replicated elsewhere in the jail system.
"Our hope is that they will take some of the lessons learned in the IRC and apply those to the other problems that remain throughout the rest of the jail facilities, especially the horrible conditions at Men's Central Jail," she said. "Part of the reason they were able to get the IRC under control is by reducing the total number of people in the L.A. County jails."
The overall jail population dropped from about 15,000 in 2023 to 13,000 today, bringing it closer to the 12,400 capacity the facilities are rated to hold, she said. But those numbers have begun to tick back up since the passage of Proposition 36 last year.
"There are still overcrowding issues in L.A. County, but at 13,000, the problem can be managed," she said. "We have some hope that now the changes are really sticking so that, even in times where there are more bookings, people's needs can still be met."
Still, the county must take steps to keep the population down and to reduce it further if it wants to see other facilities make similar turnarounds, she said.
"If you can't hire enough people to meet the needs of people in custody, you need to figure out how to reduce the number of people in custody," she said.
A year of inspection reports at Men's Central Jail, reviewed by the Southern California News Group in June, described similarly horrific conditions as those seen at the Inmate Reception Center in 2023. Report after report found instances of trash-covered cells, rat infestations and mold. Inmates complained to inspectors that they weren't provided with basic cleaning or hygienic supplies for days and weeks at a time, with some reporting that they had to use pages from books as toilet paper.
Camacho said the county has been reluctant to make similar improvements elsewhere without a court order.
"It shouldn't just be IRC that has cleaning checklists and that makes sure everyone has toilet paper," she said.