ROMPIENDO AMARRAS
EL PRINCIPIO DEL FIN
The lawsuit that produced K6G arose as a challenge to the procedures then in place for housing gay men in the Jail. Prior to 1985, there was some effort to keep homosexual prisoners segregated from the general population, with one housing module in the Jail set aside for their exclusive use. However, this early program suffered from profound design flaws. On the one hand, no efforts were made to keep gay detainees separate from GP detainees when they were outside the dorms. This meant that gay prisoners were still vulnerable to predation during the admissions process; in the court-line holding cells; and in transit to and from court, the infirmary, pill call, the visiting room, or elsewhere in the facility.279 On the other hand,
275Although it is worth noting that only six people out of the thirty-three I interviewed
had been in Jail only once or twice before, and only three were in Jail for the first time.
276Int. 49, at E4. 277Int. 93, at D5. 278Int. 88, at A8.
279See First Amended Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief at 7–8, Robertson
v. Block, No. 82 1442 WPG (Px) (C.D. Cal. Apr. 12, 1982); Dolovich, supra note 1, at 21– 23 (explaining the origins of K6G).
the program lacked controls for ensuring that only homosexuals280 were
admitted to the unit.281 As a consequence, all a would-be predator needed
to do to gain access to potential victims was to aver his homosexuality on entrance to the Jail.282
The consent decree that settled the case addressed both these concerns. It committed the Jail to adopting practices that would keep K6Gs physically separate from GPs when moving through the facility. And it created a two- stage classification process that required classification officers to interview every person who claimed to be gay on admission to the Jail, to assess the veracity of that claim.283 Both these components are still in place today and
are key to the success of the enterprise. First, policies have been implemented to manage the risk of detainee movement whenever K6Gs are outside the dorms. When in the visiting room, for example, K6Gs are seated in the first row of booths,284 directly in the sight line of the
deputies.285 In the court-processing line, K6Gs are kept in a specifically
designated holding cell, and en route to the courthouses, they sit in the front seat of the vans, protected where possible by wire cages.286 Until recently,
280I realize that using terms like “homosexual” and “gay” in the way I do risks implying
that it is possible both to determine who is “really” gay and to separate out those who “are” gay from those who are not. The formulations employed here thus court charges of both essentializing and oversimplifying the inherently fluid and even mercurial character of same- sex attraction. Even as to those men who self-identify as gay, there is a danger inherent in any effort to distinguish on the basis of sexual identity: that of equating characteristics stereotypically associated with a given identity with the identity itself, thereby making invisible those who, although they do self-identify, lack those characteristics conventionally associated with gay men. See Russell Robinson, Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration, 99 CALIF. L. REV. 1309, 1345, 1359 (2011). I address these concerns in more detail elsewhere. See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 64–81. Here, I adopt the construction employed by the Jail, by the ACLU lawyers who eventually brought suit challenging the conditions I describe, and by the consent decree discussed in the text.
281See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 21–22 (describing the design flaws of the Jail’s pre-
K6G housing program for gay detainees).
282Interview with Bart Lanni, Deputy Sheriff, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, in L.A., Cal.
(Feb. 11, 2010).
283For a detailed account of this process, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 25–43.
284In Men’s Central, all visits are non-contact. Detainees sit on stools facing a glass wall
and speak via handsets with their visitors, who are seated on the other side of the glass. The absence of contact visits was challenged by the ACLU of Southern California, but the constitutionality of the practice was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court. See Block v. Rutherford, 468 U.S. 576 (1984).
285The L.A. County Jail is administered by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Most
custodial staff at the Jail are deputy sheriffs, who rotate between staffing the Jail and patrolling the County.
286Several of these procedures, including segregation in the Men’s Central court line and
before medications began to be distributed in the dorms themselves, K6Gs were brought to pill call as a group, one dorm at a time, and monitored by deputies as they waited in the hallway to see the nurse. And whenever K6Gs move through the facility for any reason—to the classroom,287 the
infirmary, the visiting room, or the court line—they must be escorted by a deputy.
This last measure is particularly significant. The combination of extreme crowding and chronic understaffing in the Jail means that in most cases, when detainees are moving between their housing units and other parts of the facility, they are unescorted. It is standard when walking through the halls of the Jail to pass lines of unescorted detainees en route from one part of the facility to another.288 There are only two exceptions to
this rule. The first is the K10s, the facility’s highest security inmates, who are always escorted (in shackles) when out of their cells. The other is the K6Gs.289
Even with deputies as escorts, when K6Gs are outside the dorms, they are frequently subjected to verbal harassment of various sorts—catcalls, whistling, explicitly homophobic epithets, etc.—by the GP inmates whose paths they cross, and even by some deputies.290 But the rule that K6Gs may
not be outside the dorms unescorted by an officer is strictly observed. As a consequence, for the most part, K6Gs are kept from physical contact with GPs and thus protected from physical assault by them.291 Although there
provided for the segregation of “homosexual inmates” while they are at “the court facilities for which the Sheriff is responsible and are visually checked for their well-being as often as court routine permits.” Consent Decree at 7, Robertson v. Block, No. 82 1442 WPG (Px) (C.D. Cal. July 22, 1985) (on file with the author). Unfortunately, I was not able to establish whether and to what extent this segregation and regular monitoring is actually effected in the various courtrooms to which L.A. County detainees may be sent.
287There is a classroom allocated for the exclusive use of K6G. It is through this
classroom that Senior Deputy Randy Bell and Deputy Bart Lanni, K6G’s classification officers, run what they call the SMART program (for Social Mentoring and Academic Rehabilitative Training), which features an array of programming exclusively for the K6Gs. For further discussion of this program and consideration of the objection that such programming is only a way to paper over the violence of incarceration with empty reforms, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 24 n.139.
288It bears noting that in all my time in the Jail, I never felt the slightest bit of unease
when encountering unescorted detainees.
289See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 25 n.142 (discussing the views of Jail deputies
regarding this perceived special treatment).
290See supra note 108; Dolovich, supra note 1, at 57–60 (discussing the routine verbal
harassment of K6Gs by GPs and custodial staff when they are outside the dorms).
are exceptions,292 the relative impermeability of the physical boundaries
between K6Gs and GPs means that, despite the inmate code that defines gay men and trans women as available for victimization, Jail procedure largely keeps at bay any would-be GP predators.
Alongside the policies for keeping K6Gs safe from harm when outside the dorms, the two-stage K6G classification process also keeps the unit relatively free from internal predators.293 Anyone who succeeds in being
classified to K6G who proves to pose a serious threat of physical harm to others is immediately removed from the dorms and housed in one of the single cells that serve as K6G’s disciplinary wing—or, in the case of someone found to be extremely dangerous, sent to K10, the Jail’s highest security designation, and subjected to single-celling and other security measures.294
The two-step classification process enhances the physical safety of the people in K6G. The scrutiny given those who claim to qualify for admission helps to screen out would-be predators seeking access to potential victims.295 And any prisoners in K6G who are tempted to take
advantage of their proximity to people who would be prone to victimization in GP know that they risk immediate removal, whether to GP if their behavior calls into question the veracity of their initial claims to be gay, or, if not, to the unit’s disciplinary wing. Taken together with the measures that maintain the physical boundary between K6Gs and GPs when K6Gs are out of the dorms, these efforts contribute to a strong feeling of physical 292I learned of one such exception during my time in the Jail, from an interview subject
who reported being raped in the K6G court-line holding cell in Men’s Central by a GP inmate who threatened him with a razor. This assault was made possible by two flaws in the design of the court-line area. First, the holding cells have revolving entrances with horizontal metal bars like those one might see in a subway station, which allow someone to enter simply by pushing the bars. As in a subway, the rotation is one-way. Once someone has entered the cell, there is no exit without the assistance of an officer with the key. And second, the cell designated for K6Gs is not in the direct sight-line of the officers, which creates the opportunity for GPs or other non-K6G prisoners to enter the cell freely if they choose without being seen by a deputy. The problem with this layout, in other words, is that it makes K6Gs accessible to enterprising GP inmates without any deputies necessarily keeping watch. It is therefore crucial that this configuration be changed.
293See supra Part II.A.
294The original consent decree stipulated that no one properly classified to K6G may be
removed from the unit as punishment for disciplinary infractions. See Stipulation and Request for Dismissal Order at 5, Robertson v. Block, No. 82 1442 WPG (Px) (C.D. Cal. July 17, 1985) (“Under no circumstances is the classification process to be used as a disciplinary tool.”).
295As noted, this problem plagued earlier efforts by Jail administrators to segregate gay
detainees from predatory GPs. It also compromised similar efforts in New York City’s Rikers Island facility. See supra note 43.
security among K6G residents—and have unexpectedly helped to create a space in which K6Gs have felt free to abandon the hypermasculine posturing that is a staple of life in the Jail’s GP.296