Last week provided yet another reminder of just how serious the problems are in the Los Angeles County jails. As if reports of assaults on prisoners by sheriff's deputies were not disturbing enough, a Times investigation has revealed that more than 1,400 people over the last five years were wrongfully incarcerated. Some were held for days, others for weeks. All were cases of mistaken identity, in many instances made worse because protests of innocence were disregarded. In one case, a construction worker with no prior arrests said he was assaulted by inmates and ignored by deputies. In another, a man whose identity was stolen by his brother pleaded with deputies to check his wallet, where he kept a judge's order indicating that a warrant with his name on it had been wrongly issued. But his jailers refused. He was booked and his fingerprints scanned. Deputies found no matching prints, even though the warrant indicated that prints were on record, according to his lawyer. Yet he was held for days.
Those are cruel deprivations inflicted on innocent people, and they should spur Sheriff Lee Baca and his department to adopt safeguards for ensuring that they have the right people behind bars.
To be fair, the problem isn't limited to Baca's department. Similar mistakes occur in jails throughout the state. And in many cases, suspects who arrived at Los Angeles County jails had been arrested by other law enforcement agencies and undergone previous rounds of checks, including confirmations of name, date of birth and other identifying information used in warrants. What is clear, however, is that the department's rules for dealing with such claims are deficient.
The department's written policy requires that deputies investigate claims of innocence involving warrants issued by judges. But it does not set strict time lines or establish rules for handling such claims in cases that do not involve warrants. The Times' investigation concluded that deputies followed the rules in only a fraction of cases in which wrongfully jailed individuals were eventually released by courts. Baca has pledged to form a task force to investigate the problem.
That's fine, but the proliferation of task forces examining problems in the county jails — there's already one looking into allegations of deputy abuse — in an important sense misses the point. For years, monitors and others have highlighted failings in the management of the jails. What Baca needs now is not another task force to help him see what's wrong; it's to revisit the recommendations for improvement and aggressively implement them.
