Los Angeles County Shelves Plan to ‘Depopulate’ the Jails

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors shelved plans to “depopulate” the county jails in its meeting on Tuesday, reacting to a storm of criticism from police officers, the media, and ordinary members of the public.

As Breitbart News reported last week:

Los Angeles County Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsey Horvath have proposed a plan to “depopulate and decarcerate” county jails, releasing criminals to address what they call a “systemic racism” in criminal justice.

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The plan states: “To depopulate and decarcerate is a monumental task, and the Board is committed to redress historical wrongs, deeply rooted in systemic racism and prejudice, and reverse status quo responses to poverty, mental health and medical needs, and substance use dependencies.” It calls for the Supervisors to declare a “humanitarian crisis” and to take steps to reduce the population of inmates through various kinds of releases.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the plan has been pulled:

[T]he plan — labeled as a motion to “Depopulate and Decarcerate the Los Angeles County Jails” — drew criticism from justice reformers and law enforcement alike. The former said it lacked concrete deadlines for an eventual shutdown of the county’s most decrepit lockup, while the latter said that what the county really needs is not fewer jails but more modern jails.

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So on Monday afternoon — on the heels of several letters, news releases and a rally — Supervisor Hilda Solis pulled the item from this week’s agenda.

“Never did we once expect for people to come out and pick this thing apart as they did,” she told The Times, adding that she was “not happy” about the difficulties moving forward, especially given the troubling recent trajectory of several lawsuits over the county’s bad jail conditions.

Los Angeles County is suffering a massive crime wave that dates to the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.