The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors needs to take a smarter approach to the jails

Pretty much everyone in the region knows that Los Angeles County jails are in miserable shape. There are too many inmates with too few cells amid terrible supervision in dangerous conditions that too often lead to death for the crime of being imprisoned.

The ACLU analysis of the situation nails it: the jails’ current situation is “gross overcrowding that leads to people with severe mental illness being shoved by the hundreds into unsafe housing, without access to psychotropic medication, and living without adequate food, showers, or basic hygiene.”

Again, it’s no secret: The jail system here has for decades been the subject of federal decrees aimed at creating a more humane lockup. And yet conditions if anything have gotten worse.

But if an elected county leader were going to attempt to do something about the ongoing crisis, a practical politician wouldn’t do so without getting input from local law enforcement and prosecutors, the people who are closest to the situation every single day.

Yet that’s precisely what Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chair Hilda Solis did last week when she agendized a sweeping proposal to “depopulate and decarcerate” county jails without even talking to local law enforcement. The Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Association said it was blindsided by the proposal, as our staff writer Scott Schwebke reports, only learning about it Friday — and the major change was scheduled to be voted on this Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys also was not consulted, and when its members found out about the last-minute agenda item, called it “dangerous and reckless.”

Supervisor Solis is correct when she calls the jails “horrid and inhumane.” But any complex fix for the complicated situation was never going to work when announced essentially in secret.

Supervisors Kathryn Barger and Janice Hahn immediately declared their opposition: “Any plan to reduce the population of our jails needs to be decided in partnership with law enforcement, our deputy district attorneys and our courts,” Hahn correctly said.

Solis pulled the agenda item; two cheers for that. The bad news: the awfulness of the jails remains. The good: the supes know how not to find a fix.