Black Leaders Visit Jails to Soothe Tensions

The faces differed, but dorm after dorm the response stayed exactly the same.

“Who got stomped on in here last week and still needs some medical treatment?” asked Melvin Farmer, a black activist, as he stood on a stainless steel table bolted to the floor of the Pitchess Detention Center.

Half the inmates raised their hands.

“Y’all fear for your life if they put you back in general population?” Farmer shouted out.

About three-quarters of the inmates raised their hands.

And then Farmer posed the toughest question, the one top Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials are wrestling with and to which they have no clear answers.

“Y’all want to stay segregated?”

Every hand in the room shot up.

On Friday, during a visit of African American community leaders to the Pitchess jail compound, one thing was resoundingly clear: black inmates want to remain in dorms segregated by race.

Outnumbered and still anxious from three days of race rioting last week, black inmates in six dorms said they fear they will be attacked again if they are housed with Latinos. More than 80 men, most black, were injured after Latino inmates set off race brawls in many of the Pitchess dorms, authorities have said.

One 21-year-old black prisoner remains on life support after a group of six Latino inmates dragged him behind overturned beds and stabbed and kicked him. To protect blacks, authorities took the unusual step last week of separating blacks from Latinos, who outnumber them by roughly 2 to 1.

Said one African American inmate, Tom Lennox, whose arm was burned deep into the flesh from scalding water thrown on him: “They are trying to kill us in here.”

The community leaders circulated through the dorms Friday in an attempt to soothe tensions and learn more about the problems on the Pitchess compound, which houses 10,000 inmates. There was Farmer, a 43-year-old man who says he spent more than half his life in prison on robbery charges; Tony Muhammad, a fast-food executive turned Nation of Islam minister; and Rosie Milligan, a publisher of African-American books. The trio was accompanied by Sheriff’s Capt. David Betkey, who runs the North County Correctional Facility, the biggest and most troubled jail on the compound.

The group visited only black dorms, saying they didn’t want to stir up hostilities by going into Latino areas.

In every dorm the trio walked into, they were swarmed by inmates, some pressing them for names of lawyers, others complaining about deputies inside the jail who inmates said knew trouble was brewing but did nothing to prevent it, an allegation authorities have denied. Many inmates showed their wounds--a lump on a head, teeth knocked out with a shampoo bottle, razor cuts, a burned arm.

“I was reading on my bunk when six dudes jumped me and beat me with something hard,” said 40-year-old inmate Steve Cannon pointing to a bruise on his head.

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After the visit, Farmer and the others suggested several remedies to the Sheriff’s Department, including diversity workshops for inmates; meetings among dorm leaders of different races; and better racial balance within the dorms if authorities re-integrate them as planned.

Betkey said he’ll consider all of those. But he also implied that despite the wishes of the black inmates, the Sheriff’s Department is committed to re-integrating the jail--and soon. There aren’t enough resources to run two parallel custody systems based on race, he said, and the longer authorities wait, the more difficult it will be to re-integrate.

“Yet we don’t want to rush things and start the trouble all over again,” Betkey said.

Even if many sticky issues remain, Milligan said Friday’s visit lifted the spirits of inmates. Many of the men yelled, “God bless,” and “We appreciate y’all,” to the trio.

“I can see it in their eyes what this means to them,” Milligan said. “It’s like a gleam of hope.”

Also on Friday, the six Latino inmates charged with beating the black inmate pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and mayhem charges at their arraignment in San Fernando Superior Court.