Why Los Angeles Officials Voted to Cancel an Almost $2 Billion Contract
California Today
Thursday: A shift in thinking about jails and mental health. Also: Virtual restaurants, and dance parties.
Tim Arango
The men’s jail in downtown Los Angeles is often referred to as America’s largest mental health institution, a dystopian, run-down facility where mentally ill inmates are often chained to the furniture.
Ill-equipped to handle the swelling ranks of the mentally ill, the jail has fed into another of the city’s intractable social problems: homelessness, with a revolving door between the jail and nearby Skid Row.
City leaders for years have known it was a problem, but have never agreed on a solution.
That long fight over the future of incarceration in Los Angeles reached a crucial point this week. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles board of supervisors voted to cancel a nearly $2 billion contract for a new facility it had described as a mental health treatment facility and approved in February, in the face of opposition from activists who said the building was just a new jail in disguise.
“Really what we have is people living their lives, a lot of them living on Skid Row, a cycle of poverty, a cycle of drug addiction and mental illness, and then we have jails,” said Patrisse Cullors, chair of Reform L.A. Jails, a coalition of groups that has put forward a ballot initiative to change L.A.’s jail system, and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. “We don’t have an in-between infrastructure.”
County leaders placed the decision to end the contract in the context of the broader national movement to change the criminal justice system, to emphasize treatment for substance abuse and mental illness, and to reduce jail and prison populations that swelled during the era of mass incarceration. Even as efforts have been made around the country to reduce prison populations, Los Angeles, despite its reputation as a progressive haven, has been a laggard.
Hilda L. Solis, a county supervisor, described Los Angeles’s new approach as, “care first, jail second.”
Sheila Kuehl, another supervisor who has pushed to replace jails with treatment, said at Tuesday’s meeting, to cheers from activists in the audience: “Incarceration is itself an experiment, and it’s an experiment that has failed. There are a lot of countries that have said, this is not the way to go.”
Ms. Kuehl, in her remarks, evoked the devastation that the era of mass incarceration has had on minority communities and compared the decision to cancel the jail contract and find a new approach on criminal justice with the decision by the British Parliament to end the slave trade in 1807.
Now, county leaders have to come up with a new plan, which could take years and will, officials say, be based on studies that are ongoing to determine how many of Los Angeles’s thousands of inmates can be diverted from jail to treatment facilities.
“This issue around criminalizing mentally ill people is actually not just an L.A. issue,” said Ms. Cullors. “L.A. is the microcosm of what’s happening across the country. You can go to Cook County in Chicago. You can go to Rikers Island in New York.”
She continued, “If Los Angeles gets this right and is able to build a model, this could be a blueprint for the rest of the country.”
Here’s what else we’re following
— Here’s an interactive that describes what kind of shaking you’d experience and how much damage might be caused. [The Los Angeles Times]
— to shut off some power lines in fire-prone conditions. [The San Francisco Chronicle]
— A state lawmaker said when he bought the weapon used in the attack. “I don’t know where the mistake was made,” Anthony Portantino, a state senator, said. [ABC 10]
— “Don’t be evil.” Here’s a long read examining , the happiest company in tech. [Wired]
— one owner of multiple restaurants said. “Now it’s about 75 percent of it.” Hence, virtual restaurants. [The New York Times]
— “How do we bring a real-life Wakanda Institute to Oakland?” A former baby store in Oakland’s gentrifying Temescal neighborhood is becoming . [KQED]
— It’s not a condo, it’s not an apartment: And it’s a kind of housing that’s cropping up around Los Angeles. [Curbed Los Angeles]
Summer sports news
— Anaheim and the Angels are set to take a long-term stadium lease. [The Orange County Register]
— Colin Kaepernick hasn’t played in the N.F.L. since 2016, but he’s the nation’s third-most recognizable football player. [The New York Times]
— and live about 25 miles apart in South Florida. They’ve bonded recently over the trials of aging in human bodies and parenting as two of the world’s greatest athletes. [The New York Times]
And Finally …
If you’ve been enjoying listening to California music as much as we have, we’d like to invite you to a dance party.
Well, Jon Pareles, The Times’s chief pop music critic, has said he won’t bust any moves. But I will. (At least a few.)
I’ll be talking with Jon about the sounds of the Golden State at the San Francisco Public Library on Aug. 28 and at the Los Angeles Public Library the following day. We’ll move from discussion to dancing. (I should mention that, because our partners at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles were so great, the L.A. event is already sold out. We’re sorry — we’ll try to do more.)
Then, on Friday, Jon will be chatting with my colleague Sona Patel in San Diego at the Central Library.
Here’s where you can sign up to join us in San Francisco. And here’s the sign-up for the San Diego event.
Hope to see you on the dance floor.
Sign up for California Today here.
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