ACLU: Corruption and Abuse By LA County Deputies Contribute To Suicide, Report Confirms

Margaret Winter, National Prison Project
Jul 29th, 2010

John Horton was held in solitary confinement in the Los Angeles County Men‘s Central Jail following his arrest for drug possession. He committed suicide.

In the days leading up to his death in March 2009, jail staff noted that Mr. Horton was despondent. His cell was a dimly-lit, windowless, solid-front box the size of a closet. His body was already stiff by the time security staff discovered him hanging from a noose in his cell, with his hands bound – one of eight successful apparent suicides in the L.A. County jails in the past calendar year.

Shortly after the suicide, the ACLU received a letter from an inmate in an adjacent cell describing Horton’s obviously disturbed behavior and repeated suicidal gestures, which deputies had witnessed in the days before his death. The ACLU demanded that the County investigate.

In a cover-up after the suicide, at least 10 deputies engaged in a deliberate, systematic faking of surveillance logs. According to the report, the deputies created fake bar codes to circumvent a jail policy requiring deputies to document their periodic “welfare checks” on inmates, by scanning bar code plaques mounted at each end of every cell row. Ironically, the scanning system had been implemented to deter “’after the fact’ efforts to doctor welfare check logs after something ‘bad’ such as suicide had occurred”, according to the report.

The deputies’ actions “were overt and premeditated and demonstrated a wholesale failure” to carry out their duty “to diligently watch over and provide safety and security for the inmates under his or her supervision” – a failure, the report noted, which might have facilitated Horton’s suicide. The OIR report concluded that during its nine years of oversight of L.A. County Jails, it had found evidence of a “sub environment in which outlier cultures can fester and cause deputies to lose their way and sense of mission.”

Full Story Here See also: With 8th suicide, appeals for change in prison system