LA Sheriff: ACLU Exaggerates Jail Attacks
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A sheriff's spokesman says the American Civil Liberties Union is exaggerating reports of retaliation by guards against inmates at the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.
Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said there are some incidents at the jail, but nothing like the frequent violence against informant inmates described in a motion filed Friday by the ACLU with a federal judge.
"What the ACLU is characterizing does not occur in men's central jail," Whitmore said. "The judge that oversees it toured the jail recently without condemnation."
Whitmore conceded that guard retaliation did exist but said it is rare, and noted that the Office of Independent Review, which monitors the department, called the jail system the most transparent in the nation.
"Regrettably from time to time things will occur," he said, "but their characterization is exaggerated."
The ACLU, joined by Disability Rights California and the law firm Bingham McCutchen, is asking the judge for a protective order, saying detainees that talk to their organization about jail conditions are being threatened and attacked.
ACLU attorney Peter Eliasberg said the group has been trying to work with the department to end the practice, but said "the problem has just gotten worse, so we had no choice but to seek relief from the court."
"The retaliation at issue here is so extreme -- multiple credible accounts of beatings, stomping and shattered bones -- that I haven't seen anything to equal it in 17 years of prison litigation around the country," Margaret Winter of the ACLU National Prison Project said in a statement. "These witnesses must have the court's protection."
The downtown jail, one of 10 in the county system, has at times held more than a third of the county's 20,000 inmates.
It has been the center of dispute between the sheriff's department and the ACLU since the 1980s, but the legal and verbal exchanges have grown increasingly heated in the last two years, with the ACLU calling its crowded conditions "medieval" and calling for its closure.
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