Just How Bad Are We Willing to Let Jails Become?

“It was about 6:30 in the evening and we was watching the Steelers play Tampa Bay. It was about halftime. I noticed four officers and a black inmate in what they call the disciplinary pod. Basically you can be there for anything--I got there after they tried to take my extra boxers and I got mad and said, ‘I don’t give a F.’ But anyways, they was escorting the inmate up the stairs to Cell 1. . . .”

The man on the phone is a guy named James Woods, a 38-year-old violator of parole on grand theft. He’s wrapping up five months in the Los Angeles County Jail, calling from the celebrity tank. They put him there after he and eight other inmates went public with their recollections in the still-unsolved matter of Danny Ray Smith. Woods on Smith:

“He was a big guy, looked like he could’ve played lineman in school. He was wearing blue pants and a yellow hospital shirt and his pants was hanging down off his rump and I was telling my roommate, laughing, ‘I wonder what antic he done to get up in here?’ Anyway, when he got to the door, he saw an Ese in there, and he started to protest, ‘Man, I don’t want to be in there with no Mexican. Get me to another room!’ So this deputy says, ‘Am I gonna have problems with you?’ ”

This was Aug. 1. You know the rest of the story.Smith, an ex-con with mental problems, was involved in an “altercation with deputies” and died. An uncharacteristic furor erupted, and the FBI has been brought in.

“So they’re back and forth, till the deputy took his right knee and kneed him in the back and body-slammed him to the ground, and everyone started kicking and hitting him. And then the county worker put his flashlight up under his neck and started choking him out. And the sergeant came and said, ‘That’s enough,’ but they couldn’t hear. And by then we heard the guy say, ‘Man, I can’t breathe.’ And then he started making this gargling sound. . . .”

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You can’t help but wonder how bad some situations have to get before there arrives some tipping point that turns the pendulum back. For years now, the goings-on in this state’s jails and prisons have gone all but unquestioned. Jail riots at Pitchess? Convict torture at Pelican Bay? Hey, the criminals had their world and we had ours.

The situation at the L.A. County Jail has been documented from the jail deaths to the mental patients, and until recently, we’ve just let the pendulum fly. But an odd thing has happened lately, in this moment of plummeting crime rates and profligate prison spending: People are starting to wonder what’s going on behind all that concrete and barbed wire.

In Sacramento last month, allegations of brutality at Corcoran State Prison yielded, not the usual brush-off, but actual questions. One of the more candid answers came from a former corrections director who called the state’s prison buildup “unmanageable.” Last week, the police chief of suburban Monrovia called for mental health programs to keep this county’s many thousands of mentally ill inmates out of custody with preemptive treatment. He worried that Twin Towers--where such inmates are kept--is “more like a mental institution than a jail.”

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Locally, activists have pushed for answers in the Smith case well beyond the usual arc of public outrage--and despite the fact that Smith, a guy who raised pigeons, was hardly a poster boy. Court papers show an arrest record dating to childhood, with convictions for burglary, assault with a deadly weapon and assorted parole violations. His girlfriend of eight years says they met while he was in court-ordered rehab and she was homeless. He was sweet but he beat her, she said: “I must have called the cops on him 50 times.”.

Smith aside, though, it’s high time someone wondered. Last time I checked, you weren’t supposed to need the character of a choirboy to stay alive in jail. People get queasy when they have to worry that their tax dollars might be underwriting sanctioned brutality. Last year, a guy in Men’s Central Jail for a traffic violation was killed in a fight with seven deputies after he allegedly resisted a strip search; another inmate, in Twin Towers, died of asphyxiation after allegedly being hogtied. Where’s the district attorney? Why, in these matters, are charges so seldom filed?

Days after Smith’s death, a group of deputies was relieved of duty for allegedly beating another mentally ill inmate so badly that, sheriff’s sources said, you could see the flashlight bruises and the shoe prints on the man’s sides and back. Defenders of the system say such reports are aberrations in a system of 22,000 inmates. Once, I’d have gone out of my way to believe them. Now I wonder: What if they aren’t?

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com