Years of Hard Jail Duty Take Toll on Deputies

The nation’s most massive jail system has a new and potentially troublesome class of inmate, serving longer sentences than anyone else: the deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

There was a time when the agency’s rookies spent only their first 18 months guarding the county jails. No more. Today, new deputies are being stuck on custody duty for five, six, even seven years because of a growing backlog in patrol jobs.

“It’s like being in jail,” groused former Deputy John Lewis, who quit in frustration several years ago to join another local police department.

But there’s more at stake than employee morale. Some people inside and outside the Sheriff’s Department fear that the resentments born of years in the custody division are producing a “culture of violence” among young deputies--making them more abusive in the jail and more hardened toward the communities they eventually will patrol.

In sharp contrast to other parts of the department, violence by deputies in the custody division remains alarmingly high, accounting for a disproportionate share of lawsuits against the county, records and interviews show.

Among those most worried by this trend is attorney Merrick J. Bobb, who serves as special counsel to the sheriff on implementing departmental reforms.

Bobb calls the interminable jail stints “unhealthy and demoralizing.” Worse yet, he said, the assignments threaten to reinforce “prejudice and insensitivity,” coloring the deputies’ treatment of law-abiding residents in the 3,200 square miles patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department.

American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Paul L. Hoffman, whose organization has long been in the forefront of reforming the county’s jails, says such attitudes are inevitable, especially considering that about two-thirds of the deputies are white.

“If you have [a deputy] that’s spent five years on the inside and their only view of a black or a Latino is to see them as gang-bangers and crooks, what are they going to do when they see those people on the outside?,” he asked. “You’re exacerbating an already difficult job.”

Take the now-notorious case of the Cerritos bridal shower, which culminated last year in a record $18-million verdict against the county over the 1989 beating of a family of Samoan Americans at the hands of sheriff’s deputies.

Jurors found that deputies brutalized or falsely arrested 36 party-goers, then gave heavily disputed testimony about what had happened.

A review of depositions and records shows that of the 32 deputies involved in the altercation, 23 had recently left the jails to become patrol officers. Some involved in the case believe the connection is more than coincidence.

Gary Mardirossian, the Los Angeles civil rights lawyer who won the verdict, blames the violence that summer night on Sheriff’s Department “machoism,” bred in part by the hardened edge of many deputies who left the jails with a tainted view of the world.

“They’re trained in the jails, and unfortunately they’re surrounded by [inmates] who are mostly minorities,” he said in an interview. “Then they’re sent to a neighborhood that’s mostly homogenous--white. And the first time they see a group that’s a minority, they immediately associate them with the bad guys they’ve dealt with.

“Then,” he said, “they simply overreact.”

‘Stagnated Troops’

For years, community activists and police critics have chided the Sheriff’s Department for introducing its deputies to law enforcement by submerging them in the mind-bending world of the jails, if even for a year or so. Today, with tours of duty escalating beyond what anyone imagined, critics contend that radical steps may be needed before a new generation of jailhouse deputies moves onto the streets.

As recently as the early 1990s, deputies were told during training that they probably would spend no more than two years working the custody operation. But budget cutbacks, a two-year freeze on new hires and an influx of hundreds of new veteran deputies as part of the 1994 merger of the county marshal’s office caused a logjam in non-custody jobs, vastly extending jail stints.

Sheriff Sherman Block insists that his options are limited without funds for new deputies. The department has considered solutions such as rotating deputies between field patrol and jail, he said in an interview, “but you know what the people in custody [jobs] tell you? They don’t want to be rotated. They tell you that when they get out, they want to stay out.”

Elsewhere in the nation, some departments have hired civilian guards, who have no expectation of leaving their jail jobs. They also earn substantially less. In Los Angeles, deputies make up to about $55,000 a year and have received steady pay hikes, despite the county’s budget problems. Custody Chief Mark Squiers insists, however, that inmates here are too volatile for the jails to be turned over to anyone other than law enforcement professionals.

Sheriff’s officials said they do not believe the slow rotation is fueling major problems. But as the backlog has worsened in the last few years, that view has faced increasing challenge.

“He [Block] has stagnated his troops,” said Senior Deputy Bill Jaeger, 28, in his sixth year on jail duty with no immediate end in sight. “Guys who are ready to go out and do efficient police work are sitting here in a jail, stuck, cooped up, confined, and [administrators] don’t care anymore. . . . I don’t think the department is looking to change that.”

Confidential employee interviews, conducted as part of a 1992 study of the department and obtained by The Times, reveal that many jail deputies have felt entrapped, blaming the work for problems in their personal lives.

“I was looking at the bad in everybody,” said one deputy, who began sitting with his back to the wall everywhere he went.

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Even the most frustrated deputies concede that there is some value in starting their careers in the jail. There, they get to see the workings of the criminal mind--the gang signs flashed down the congested cell blocks, the street lingo bantered about by druggies and taggers, the “con games” that the wiliest inmates try to pull every day on the rookies. But, in time, the lessons become tired and reality sets in.

“Somewhere around two years it hits you,” said Deputy Ed Sanders, 30, now in his fifth year on jail duty. “You’ve seen all you’re going to see around here, and it starts to keep your motivation down. It gets old. I cannot promote, I cannot transfer out. All your goals are on hold. . . . You’re on the factory line, watching the parts go by.”

There is mounting evidence that a high price is being paid not only by the deputies, but by the inmates. Recent episodes illustrate the many potential trigger points for confrontation:

An inmate refuses to leave his cell and confronts a seven-man team of deputies who proceed to punch and club him and spray him with tear gas, breaking his jaw before subduing him. The reason deputies wanted him out of his cell: A nurse had to take his blood pressure.

An alleged burglar is stabbed to death by three fellow inmates in a particularly tough cell block. His family alleges that deputies stood by and let it happen, ignoring the young man’s screams from behind the closed gates of his block.

A female deputy becomes offended by an inmate’s sexist remarks and slaps the cuffed prisoner in the face, then uncuffs him and challenges him to a fight.

A drunken driver gets in an argument with deputies and is strapped to his bed for eight straight days, causing such severe medical damage that his right leg has to be amputated.

“It does the deputy and the department no good to have deputies in custody jobs for so long,” special counsel Bobb wrote three months ago in a report to the sheriff. “Almost all the troublesome cases we have seen recently seem to come from jail settings where deputies have become callous or lash out in anger.”

Even some top officers acknowledge that the pent-up frustrations can turn ugly.

“I’ve got to be a realist,” said Capt. Norman L. Smith of Internal Affairs, who oversees in-house probes of alleged wrongdoing. “It’s got to get frustrating [to work years in jail], and maybe your tolerance level will diminish. Does seven years of custody change you? Well, yeah, maybe.”

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But if the jails have become too violent, the deputies insist it is because the inmates are an increasingly hard-core bunch of “three strikers” and other violent offenders who show little regard for authority. What’s more, Sheriff Block says that Los Angeles jails are thought to have fewer deputies per prisoner than any other jail in the nation.

Jail duty, department veterans say, has become a grueling marathon in which the runners constantly are checking their backs to see who might “shank” them with a makeshift dagger. Inevitably, the deputies say, they get tired of running the race.

Deputy Rob DeYoung, now in his sixth year at the jail, often hears the same refrain from colleagues who have made it into the field: “When you gonna get out? When you gonna get out?” DeYoung doesn’t know what to tell them. All he knows for sure is that he’s not doing what he enlisted to do.

“I’d like to take ‘em to jail,” he said, “that’s why I got into this.”

Even gangbangers on the streets know the job’s dead-end reputation.

Deputy Randy Hasnas, who graduated to patrol last year, was reminded of his nearly six years of jail duty one recent night in East Los Angeles as he busted a crew of teenage gang members--or “terrorists,” as he calls them--for illegally carrying a baton.

A tagger known as “Sorrow,” his hands pasted on the hood of a sheriff’s car as he was searched, told the deputies casually about how his cousin wants to be a cop. But not a sheriff’s deputy, he said quickly. “Not with all that time you gotta do waiting in the county [jails]. . . . He wants to be on the street where all the action is.”

Boredom to Bedlam

The jailer’s life is one of extremes: Hour upon hour of boredom essentially is spent awaiting crisis--averting it when possible, confronting it when necessary.

In a system as busy and volatile as the eight Los Angeles County jails, where the 19,000-inmate population is bigger than that of many state prison systems, the extremes grow even more stark. The hours of tedious head counts, lineups and shower runs become spread out over years, the times of crisis packed into flash points of escapes, violence and rioting.

The conflicts have grown more severe, many deputies say, since the Rodney G. King beating in 1991 and the subsequent anti-police backlash. With deputies wary of stirring excessive-force charges, many say their bosses have hamstrung them--and the inmates know it.

Deputies say that most inmates used to dutifully keep their hands in their pockets while walking the cavernous halls. They stepped aside when staffers approached. Many wouldn’t dare look a deputy in the eye.

“You told an inmate in 1990 to do something, he’d do it,” said former deputy Lewis. “You told him in 1992, he’d ask why.”

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Chris Le, a 26-year-old deputy working custody since 1994, sees the change every day as he works the mess hall at the county’s central jail looking for signs of potential unrest: an unusually quiet table of “fish”--the deputies’ mocking nickname for the inmates--or a large cluster of inmates of the same race.

Today’s inmates, Le said as he watched them grab slices of bread, “demand a lot more now--free housing, free medical, free food. They hear about it out on the street, and they expect it for themselves.”

As he faces years more on jail duty himself, Le doesn’t hide his bitterness.

“You hear the whining every single day, and it gets to you. I wanted to be a police officer, not a baby-sitter,” Le said. “I look forward to getting out on patrol--that’s the only thing I look forward to around here.”

It is this widespread sense of frustration, say some experts who have studied the jails, that has spurred problems beyond career concerns.

The years of custody duty may prompt some deputies to do their jobs too aggressively, letting out their anger on the prisoners. Others, meanwhile, have become too close to inmates, aiding them in drug and cigarette black-marketing or even having sex with them.

That’s what happened in 1994--with tragic consequences--when Lori Anderson, a deputy at Sybil Brand Institute itching to get out on patrol, and Margarita Rodriguez, an inmate with a long history of drug abuse, met in the laundry area and quickly became lovers.

The inmate began calling the deputy collect at home, often talking more than four hours, and Rodriguez moved into Anderson’s Fairfax apartment after her release. The romance ended in violence days later, when Rodriguez shot the deputy to death after an argument, leading to her conviction last month for involuntary manslaughter.

“I couldn’t believe I was falling for a cop,” a sobbing Rodriguez told police.

Most inmates say that’s their last worry.

“These guys like beating on people. This is the county jail, partner,” said Leslie Hazzard, a 42-year-old Hollywood man who is incarcerated on a petty theft charge and who alleged to a judge last month that deputies at the intake center roughed him up.

Uncurbed Violence

Four years ago, in the face of widespread allegations of deputy violence, county leaders created the Kolts Commission, which recommended broad reforms. Since then, commission counsel Bobb and his staff have concluded repeatedly that the jails are lagging well behind other divisions in curbing “wholly gratuitous force.”

The Kolts researchers said in one unpublished report that deputies were becoming “socialized to harsh, uncivil, demeaning treatment of inmates.”

Just last summer, the special counsel found that excessive force was “still practiced to an uncomfortable and unacceptable degree in the custody setting,” with deputies quick to “overreact to apparently slight provocations.”

In one recent incident, for example, an inmate in the chow line complained about the food, and a deputy responded by placing him in a wrist lock and shoving him against the wall, bruising his head. The deputy got a written reprimand for failing to report the incident.

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Sometimes the hostilities may stop short of violence but nonetheless can have serious consequences for inmates--and taxpayers.

One HIV-positive inmate alleged that jail personnel repeatedly denied him his AZT medication and berated him with homophobic remarks. He sued, saying his life was endangered by the lack of proper medical treatment. County taxpayers ended up settling his case for $17,500.

Another inmate said a deputy forced him to reveal he had been charged with child molestation--a scarlet letter crime in the hard-core halls of the jail. The inmate said he was later stabbed a dozen times by other inmates because of the exposure. He got $15,000 from the county.

Last week, the county approved a $2.5-million settlement for a mentally ill man who had been incarcerated on a vandalism charge. The man allegedly was denied medication for his paranoid schizophrenia and then released without his family’s knowledge. Disoriented, he wandered into the path of a train and was crippled for life.

Such litigation, one way to chart problems, reveals some troubling trends.

The Sheriff’s Department as a whole has seen an impressive decline in claims against it. The number of new lawsuits dropped by more than half from 1994 to 1995 while payouts fell sharply, to $11.9 million from a high of $26.2 million three years earlier, records show.

But the jails are the notable exception: New lawsuits shot up from 48 to 62 last fiscal year. And use-of-force claims in particular--alleging brutality of cuffed prisoners and unjustified shootings in cell “extractions,” among other things--climbed more than 40% through 1995.

“The pattern I see is that people [in jail] just get beat up for nothing,” said attorney Monday U. Abengowe, who has settled a handful of recent inmate suits. “And [the deputies] usually cover their badges so nobody will get their names.”

But some deputies do get punished--leading to serious in-house discipline more than twice as often for custody personnel as for those on patrol, records from 1993 through 1995 show. There were 544 total jail disciplinings in that time, with 56 involving long-term suspensions or worse.

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Yet the reality, recent reports suggest, may be even worse.

The special counsel has found that inmates lodging brutality claims often meet with “sarcasm and overt hostility” from sheriff’s officials, who openly mock their allegations.

A February report questioned whether the department has any real interest in learning from its problems. After one inmate was shot three times with a plastic-bullet gun when he refused to leave his cell, risk managers were asked to assess training and policy issues raised by the episode. “None,” they checked.

“Their review was essentially meaningless,” the counsel wrote. “The county will have paid its money [in a $20,000 settlement], a man has suffered a broken jaw, and nothing is gained in terms of . . . prevention of similar injuries to inmates or litigation in the future.”

For many deputies and administrators, however, such rebukes from “outsiders” are pure anathema.

“It’s hard to pass judgment on how a deputy reacts unless you’ve been there and you’ve got 30 guys mad-dogging you, surrounding you and staring you down and waiting to see how you’re gonna respond,” said retired Deputy Brett Maxey.

Maxey should know. The Riverside County man was forced into retirement earlier this year at age 29, his career cut short by neurological damage and other disabilities suffered in an attack at the central jail.

It started when a Crip in line at the mess hall tried to grab some extra slices of bread one day in 1994.

Maxey, then a bruising 240-pounder, tried to clear out several inmates as trouble broke. Instead, after an angry exchange of words, Maxey says, he was rushed by about 20 prisoners, then kicked repeatedly in the head, stabbed with his own pen and knocked unconscious.

Maxey misses the police work--but not the job’s downside.

“The longer you spend in there, the more time you’re exposed to the bad elements. . . . It’s going to affect anyone. It makes them bitter,” Maxey said. “After you’ve dealt with nothing but liars and crooks and molesters and rapists for years and years, you have a hard time believing people anymore. You think everybody’s got an angle.”

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Indeed, Latino activist and Chicano studies professor Evangeline Ordaz says the long jail stints go a long way toward explaining the disrespectful manner in which many minorities say they are treated every day by sheriff’s deputies.

A former Legal Aid lawyer, Ordaz remembers one Latino family that was effectively harassed by deputies because gang members would hang out on their property at an East L.A. housing project; three times officials tried to evict the family--who themselves had been victimized by the gang--and three times they lost.

“The deputies assume everyone’s a gang member,” she said. “You see an attitude of really extreme cynicism, and a lot of [residents] feel they’re treated like the scum of the earth.”

It is the job of people like Ben Garcia, training sergeant at the volatile East Los Angeles sheriff’s station, to counter such attitudes.

Jail deputies come to him both nervous and excited, Garcia said. “They feel like they’ve been paroled. It’s like you’ve been in jail--and now you’re out,” he said.

But with the freedom come drawbacks--particularly in an area like East Los Angeles where the citizenry is overwhelmingly Latino. The deputies leaving the jails “perceive a lot of [the residents] as bad guys . . . until they begin to realize that 98% of these people are hard-working,” Garcia said.

“Their perceptions,” he said, “have to change.”

About This Series

The Times today presents the last of a three-part series exploring conditions at Los Angeles County’s jails:

* Sunday: Racial warfare explodes inside L.A.’s most volatile jail complex.

* Monday: Convicts are back on the streets in no time--often to commit more crimes.

* Today: Years on the inside breed frustration and cynicism among jailers.