LOS ANGELES _ Los Angeles County supervisors narrowly approved a plan Tuesday to tear down the dungeon-like Men's Central Jail downtown and build at least one mental health treatment facility in its place.
The new plan modifies an existing $2.2 billion proposal that would have created the Consolidated Correctional Treatment Facility, which was slated to house 3,885 "inmate patients" in a rehabilitation-focused center in the footprint of the Central Jail.
Under a key provision approved Tuesday, the Department of Health Services would oversee the new facility, rather than the Sheriff's Department, which currently manages all jail operations. The new space would be staffed by the Department of Mental Health, with a limited number of deputies serving in the facility for security needs.
The county would also consider building a series of smaller mental health centers instead of a single, large hospital.
Supervisors Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl opposed the move, arguing the plan might still allow for the construction of a massive building with thousands of beds, which they say would lead to poor outcomes for people suffering from mental illness.
The revised plan would keep the underlying construction contract that was slated for the CCTF and instead use it to build something else. Kuehl and Solis, though, said the contract may not allow enough flexibility to create a completely different project.
The population of inmates who are medically or mentally ill has surged in recent years, making up an estimated 70 percent of people held in the county jail system.
The board's action Tuesday means the CCTF, which had been in progress since 2015, will no longer be built. It was billed as representing a "paradigm shift" in the treatment of inmates.
That proposal called for inmates currently held at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, the primary site for inmates with mental illness or drug addiction, to be moved to the CCTF. Men's Central Jail inmates would be transferred to Twin Towers.
Community activists have long opposed the construction of any new jails, arguing that the billions of dollars devoted to a new facility would be better spent on re-entry programs and other alternatives to incarceration. More than a hundred advocates for jail reform, dressed in orange shirts, filled the auditorium Tuesday and opposed the mental health hospital, arguing it would become a dressed-up jail.
Also Tuesday, the supervisors voted to kill a longtime proposal to convert the Mira Loma detention facility in Lancaster into a new women's jail.
