Crstnamre
02-12-2006, 04:47 AM
Race walls won't end jail riots
By Jody Kent, JODY KENT is coordinator of the Jails Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
For years, Sheriff Lee Baca has known that the L.A. County jails are a powder keg. Overcrowding and understaffing, and the increased tension that those two factors bring, have created a situation potentially so volatile that everyone inside — inmates and deputies alike — is unsafe. Last week, dilapidated, outmoded facilities provided the fire that ignited the fuse.
Despite what you may be hearing, race is not the issue. Sure, racial tensions carry over from the streets and into the jails. If a major fight breaks out, street gang and all other affiliations are pushed aside and inmates join with others of the same race. If they don't, they can expect to be targeted and attacked by members of the group they abandoned.
But segregating inmates by race doesn't solve the problem. It does nothing to identify the problem inmates who create the violence and mastermind riots in the jails. Those high-risk inmates feed off the racial tension and magnify it.
Read the whole article here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-kent12feb12,0,5166207.story
By Jody Kent, JODY KENT is coordinator of the Jails Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
For years, Sheriff Lee Baca has known that the L.A. County jails are a powder keg. Overcrowding and understaffing, and the increased tension that those two factors bring, have created a situation potentially so volatile that everyone inside — inmates and deputies alike — is unsafe. Last week, dilapidated, outmoded facilities provided the fire that ignited the fuse.
Despite what you may be hearing, race is not the issue. Sure, racial tensions carry over from the streets and into the jails. If a major fight breaks out, street gang and all other affiliations are pushed aside and inmates join with others of the same race. If they don't, they can expect to be targeted and attacked by members of the group they abandoned.
But segregating inmates by race doesn't solve the problem. It does nothing to identify the problem inmates who create the violence and mastermind riots in the jails. Those high-risk inmates feed off the racial tension and magnify it.
Read the whole article here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-kent12feb12,0,5166207.story