Closing Men’s Central Jail in LA without a Replacement Will Do a Lot More Harm than Good

For over a decade now, Los Angeles has debated the fate of Men’s Central Jail, a massive, outdated facility located in the county detention complex near downtown. When it began, the debate was about how to replace Men’s Central Jail with a modern correctional facility. Over the years, though, progressives, animated by “defund” ideology, have shifted the focus to closing Men’s Central without a replacement, which would shrink county jail capacity by about one-quarter.

A local movement known as “Care First, Jails Last” calls for transferring responsibility for large numbers of criminal offenders from jails to community-based social programs. Proponents claim that this would benefit, above all, mentally ill inmates, whose needs have been a top priority of the Men’s Central Jail debate all along. Anyone with a sense of decency should find the high rate of mental illness among L.A. County jail inmates shocking. But it does not follow that one must therefore endorse the abolitionist agenda.

One of seven jails run by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Men’s Central, on an average day, holds about 3,400 inmates, one-quarter of everyone in custody. Close to 40 percent of high-security county inmates are held at Men’s Central Jail. About 40 percent of county inmates are considered part of the “mental-health population.” Some are confined at Men’s Central, though most, and most of those with serious mental illness, are in custody at the neighboring Twin Towers Correctional Facility.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Orange County Register

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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Adapted from City Journal.

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