Day 1 for deputies: Go to jail

DEPUTY Norma Silva leads a line of inmates down a long corridor.

The air smells stale. Sunlight slants through the window slits above her head, drawing hash marks on the concrete floor in front of her.

Silva has put in almost two years at North County Correctional Facility, a massive 3,400-bed jail in Castaic. She barely needs a backward glance to catch her charges flashing gang hand signals.

“Keep looking forward, gentlemen,” she says, not breaking stride. “No talking. Hands in your pockets.”

Like almost everyone else who joins the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Silva aspires to be a cop, not a jailer. But so far, jailer is her role.

All new L.A. County deputies start their careers this way. Plunged into a strange, predatory world, they endure conditions most of them never conceived of before joining the force.

Deputies have been punched, slashed, spit on and “gassed” -- doused with urine, feces or blood -- by inmates. They are exposed to squalor and disease. In recent years, they have had to work so much overtime that a miniature trailer park has sprung up in the jail’s parking lot, where about a dozen officers sleep on any given day.

Sheriff’s executives say this harsh initiation gives rookies a graduate education in criminal behavior, molding them into streetwise, poised police.

“It is truly the foundation of being a good cop,” Assistant Sheriff Paul Tanaka said. “When you get out on the street, you are far better prepared than if you just graduated from the academy.”

Yet agency watchdogs have long feared that the jail environment is so corrosive that it is liable, as county special counsel James G. Kolts wrote in a 1992 report, to “turn any young, inexperienced man or woman into a cynical authoritarian ready to harass, intimidate, bully and physically punish any person who does not immediately follow orders.”

More than a decade ago, the Sheriff’s Department set the goal of limiting jail rotations to no more than two years.

Until a recent hiring surge, however, terms had stretched up to seven years, matching the longest they had ever been. Many blamed the extended tours for causing unprecedented attrition. More than 200 custody division deputies have left the department for other law enforcement agencies since 2003.

At least five California counties have concluded that it is wiser, and in some cases cheaper, to use civilians or specialized officers to guard inmates.

Experts have urged L.A. County to do the same, but Tanaka said the Sheriff’s Department remains convinced that here, where the jails have become more akin to state prisons, the job requires skills that only deputies, with their training as peace officers, possess.

Silva figures she has another year and a half until her transfer to patrol. She is not impatient, she said, though even her best days at the jail have a grinding sameness. Her worst, like Feb. 4, when the jail erupted in deadly race riots, are a scary blur.

On this Monday in July, Silva drops off her line of inmates to be bused downtown, then picks up a doleful pair who have just lost coveted posts at the jailhouse laundry. One confesses that he was caught sleeping on the job.

Arriving back at a guard station, she chugs bottled water, then catches sight of a mountainous, tattooed inmate in a dormitory 20 yards away. She pulls her flashlight from her belt and points it into his eyes.

“Put your shirt on,” she said, flicking the light on and off. He does.

“You can’t let them get away with giving you attitude,” she said. “Then you lose that little bit of control you need.”

SILVA is among nearly 2,000 deputies who staff the county jail system, the nation’s largest and, arguably, toughest.

They guard an inmate population that averages 18,000. Most by far are awaiting trial on charges of violent felonies. Staff-to-inmate ratios can be as lopsided as 1 to 10. The national average, calculated in a 1999 national jail census, is 1 to 4.3.

In an environment rife with what they caustically call the “inmate funk,” jail deputies have contracted staph infections, meningitis and encephalitis. Anti-bacterial soap dispensers dot the walls. Visitors receive stern warnings not to touch anything.

Silva works in the jail’s 700 Building as what’s called a prowler, roaming its two floors and assisting other deputies with a variety of tasks.

Her responsibilities put her in near-constant motion. Less than two hours into Monday’s shift, she has hustled four sets of inmates into or out of the jail -- to court, to other jails, to medical facilities -- methodically barking out names and matching ID numbers.

Shuttling among the building’s 16 two-tiered dormitories, which house about 65 men apiece, she has plodded through the shift’s first head count.

Count finally reconciled, Silva and her crew launch into a search of Dorm 726. Male deputies order the inmates to put their hands on their heads and march single-file into a nearby day room. There, they are told to strip and bend over. On the count of three, they cough in unison.

“Looking down people’s butt holes isn’t in the recruitment video,” Senior Deputy John Melville noted dryly.

Silva and the other female deputies rummage through inmates’ belongings, looking for contraband.

She yanks up a mattress, running a gloved finger underneath a metal bed frame to feel for razor blades, then leafs through a stack of mail. In the past, she has found greeting cards dipped in methamphetamine and rolls of pot inside letters.

Silva, 35, joined the Sheriff’s Department after more than a decade working at an East Los Angeles graphic arts company, selling brochures to car dealerships. Single with no children, she saw law enforcement as an adventure. She said she felt a rush when she went on ride-alongs with sheriff’s deputies at the department’s Industry station.

“They took the bad guys away,” she said.

She looked the jails over carefully before applying to the Sheriff’s Department. Tall and athletic, she did not find them intimidating, she said. At first, however, their unnerving reality outstripped her expectations.

“My first three days or so, I was so overwhelmed,” she said. “They gave me my keys and radio and told me I would be letting the inmates out. I had to pause for a minute and say, ‘Wait, I let them out?’ ”

Silva soon absorbed the language of the jails, where inmates are “fish,” whites are “woods” and transfers who turn up at the North County Correctional Facility when they shouldn’t are “stolen bodies.”

She saw the ritualized way of life inmates create for themselves, always ordered by race. Pay phones are marked as black or Latino by the way the receiver hangs. Crossing in front of the wrong day room table, onto another group’s turf, can trigger a confrontation.

Inmates were happy to talk to her about how and why they committed their crimes. Their claims of innocence, or that drug addiction forced them into desperate acts, often made her less sympathetic, though, not more.

“I don’t have compassion for inmates,” she said. “They’re here because they caused pain to somebody.”

For some, the “Groundhog Day” repetition of jail duty saps morale and motivation.

“Custody ruins people,” said another deputy at the jail, where he has been stationed for more than five years. “You sit around. You become stagnant. Sometimes you get lazy.”

Silva said going on department-sanctioned ride-alongs in her off hours helps combat the sense that she is marking time. She feels a quiet satisfaction, she said, when her part of the jail works as it should.

Tossing Dorm 726 took the better part of an hour.

By the end, knee-high piles of forbidden items cover the floor: loose blades, stashes of extra linen, pictures of women in their underwear, bags of fruit and bread that inmates save to make an alcoholic brew called pruno.

Deputies say they try to search at least one dorm per shift.

Silva looks at the mess.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like the cleaning lady.”

VIOLENCE is a constant backdrop to Silva’s work, so commonplace she no longer gives it much thought.

Her radio buzzes intermittently with traffic about 415s, altercations somewhere in the jail. Most are “inmate only” -- there were 614 inmate-on-inmate assaults at the jail in 2005, more than twice as many as in 2000.

The alerts Silva has come to dread are “deputy involved.” Inmate attacks on the jail’s staff have almost tripled since 2000 and average about 30 a year. In the summer of 2005, an inmate swung a broom handle, baseball-bat style, into a deputy’s head, fracturing his skull.

So far, Silva has been spared. Still, she said, she has learned to see even the most innocuous-looking objects and people as potential threats.

Assaults can inflict as much damage on deputies’ psyches as on their bodies.

“It’s humiliating,” said a deputy who was once drenched in urine hurled by an inmate. “Imagine walking down a row of inmates with excrement running down your face and they’re yelling and taunting you. They know they have hepatitis. They know they have AIDS. They aim for an open area -- your nose, your eyes, your mouth.”

Deputies can come to see inflicting force of their own as the only way to survive, he added.

“If you scream and run away, they know they’ve got you,” said the deputy, a hulking weightlifter who declined to give his name for publication for fear that his frankness would prompt discipline. “Anybody gasses me, they know they’re going to get beat up. Simple as that.”

Roger Clark, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s lieutenant, said it is inevitable that some deputies take this hardened mind-set with them when they become patrol officers.

“When you’re in a system for years that dehumanizes, how can you be expected to treat anyone differently when you go to the streets?” he said. “It becomes a muscle memory response.”

Knowing that their seemingly controlled surroundings can dissolve into chaos at any moment leaves the jail’s staffers tense.

In the months before the February riots, disturbances broke out weekly in 700 Building. Silva learned to recognize signs that a fight was coming. An eerie stillness. The sound of running.

“All of a sudden a dorm would split in half,” she said, Latinos on one side, blacks on the other. “And then it’s like two waves crashing.”

Silva was on duty Feb. 4 when she heard the call come through about a fight in Dorm 711. She and the other prowlers ran to the unit and sprayed it with Clear Out, similar to tear gas. As the inmates calmed down, Silva caught movement out of the corner of her eye.

“I turned around and I realized all the dorms were fighting,” she said. Later, she helped carry away the body of an inmate beaten to death.

Since then, the jail has stayed relatively tranquil, even when waves of violence have hit other parts of the system.

At 9:30 p.m., half an hour before her shift ends, Silva sinks into a chair at a guard station. Feet finally still, her eyes continue making a weary circuit around the nearby dorms as the inmates prepare for bed.

What she sees of the jails’ harshest side, she keeps to herself.

“My friends and family, I never talk about what happens at work with them,” she said. “I don’t need them to worry more than they already do.”

AT 6:30 the next morning, Silva is back at the jail. Actually, she’s been there half an hour, delaying the start of her day because the deputies’ union contract prohibits working full double shifts on consecutive days.

“I feel like I just left here,” she said, yawning, as she straps a stun gun around her right thigh.

She tucks the lunch she’s brought from home in the refrigerator. Other deputies eat in the officers’ dining room, their food prepared by inmates. Not Silva.

“I cook my food,” she said. “I know what I put in it.”

Her week is shaping up in typical fashion: Two shifts on Monday, two on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, two on Thursday, two on Friday, one on Saturday -- close to 80 hours on duty, then the next three days off.

Many of the other deputies on her regular shift are back for doubles too, their eyes rimmed with red, their skin more ashy than it was the night before.

Silva, a self-described workaholic, happily volunteers for extra work. The overtime pay is good. About 500 custody deputies -- more than one in four -- made at least $100,000 in 2005, when overtime hit a peak, county records show; 117 made more than $150,000.

But in periods when department staffing has fallen to its lowest, jail deputies have been compelled to pick up additional shifts, willing or not. At times, supervisors lock the jail gates until they get enough “volunteers” to meet their needs.

Deputies say fatigue puts them at greater risk, leaving them less alert and fraying their patience. Inmates try to take advantage, switching cells, picking fights or pressing for privileges.

“You’re either physically tired or mentally tired,” said Deputy April Nelsen, starting her 6 a.m. shift at Men’s Central Jail by downing a Red Bull.

As Silva heads into her second straight 15-hour-plus day, there’s no more good-natured banter as she moves through her usual tasks.

“What don’t you guys understand about ‘No talking’?” she snapped at three men waiting in a day room for pills from the nurse. She orders another deputy to keep them there, where they can’t watch TV or go to other activities, when other inmates return to their dorms.

“They’re going to be in there a while,” she said, blowing out an exasperated breath.

DEPUTIES’ discontent with jail tours has intensified cyclically, whenever the Sheriff’s Department has gone through lean times.

Raymond Kress left last year, at the tail end of a hiring freeze that had slowed transfers to patrol to a crawl. After three years at the jail, he was so frustrated that he took a job with the Nevada County Sheriff’s Department.

“You’re not making a difference, not helping people, which is what most of us got into law enforcement to do,” said Kress, honor graduate of his 2002 academy class. “You almost stop caring about the basic community of people.”

In the last year, an infusion of county money has spurred hiring and helped shorten jail assignments. Deputies now serve two to four years. Those willing to transfer to the department’s least popular patrol stations, such as Palmdale, could spend a year or less in the jails.

It may not stay that way, Tanaka acknowledged.

“We can’t force the amount of time served in custody to become shorter,” he said. “We can only hope that all the factors fall into place.”

Silva is holding out for Century, a busy station with a long waiting list.

So, for now, each day brings more fish lines, more head counts, more dorm searches. She collects a disgruntled inmate who mouthed off during a search and heads for the building for inmates being disciplined.

“Why am I going to the hole?” he asks as Silva leads him away.

She stares straight ahead.

“They test you all day long,” she said.

robin.fields@latimes.com

stuart.pfeifer@latimes.com