The above sections identify several factors that have come together to allow people in K6G to feel sufficiently safe and secure to forego the self- protective mechanisms of hypermasculine posturing and gang affiliation. The subtitle of this Article refers to “accidental humanity” because, as I have suggested, this confluence of features emerged not by design, but rather by a series of fortuities that together created the possibility of a more humane alternative to life in the Jail’s GP units.
For some, however, this characterization may seem inapt, at least to some extent. Certainly, it seems a happy accident that the two officers assigned to K6G turned out to be so compassionate, broad-minded, and committed to the safety and well-being of unit residents. Yes, these
qualities were likely the same ones that led Bell and Lanni to be selected for this position and that led them to accept it—even knowing, as they surely must have, that taking on the assignment would set them apart from their peers and open them up to harassment by colleagues uncomfortable with the populations K6G serves. But the fact that these men worked in the Jail in the first place, the way they proved even more steely in their dedication to the project than could have ever been expected, the depth of their determination to make the carceral experience as safe and productive as possible for the people in the unit—all this could not have been anticipated. Considered in light of all the good Bell and Lanni have done over the past three decades and how badly the experiment could have gone in different hands, their longstanding presence in the classification office seems fortunate in the extreme.364 And although it may seem obvious in retrospect
that a sense of community and a web of personal connection would arise in a small unit housing people with high recidivism rates and a common identity and life experience, there is no reason to think this result was even contemplated at the time the unit was established, much less that it was a motivating aim of the program. In this way, too, these humanizing effects have been fortuitous—and the same might be said of any positive effects to have emerged from the attention the unit has received from interested outside parties.
However, as to the first factor—the institutional commitment to keeping the people in K6G separate and apart from GP—the notion of fortuity may be thought by some to be misplaced. The procedures that govern the housing and movement of people in K6G did not emerge by accident; to the contrary, they were established pursuant to a court order mandating their implementation. That Jail officials continue to follow the rules laid down in that judicial directive, it might be thought, is not a lucky break, but simply their ongoing legal obligation.
This perspective reflects an appealing faith in the power of the law to generate needed structural change. On this view, lawsuits are filed, liability is found, courts order institutional reforms, and those reforms ensue—end of story. But as Joel Handler observed more than thirty years ago, structural injunctions are not self-executing.365 Institutional change does
not come easily, especially to complex bureaucracies, and even more so where, as here, reform depends on “lower-level [behavioral] changes” that “supervisors [can] even experience great difficulty” in implementing.366
364Int. 101, at A13 (“Thank God for Bell and Lanni.”).
365See JOEL F.HANDLER,SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM 24 (1978). 366Id.; see also Scott Cummings, Litigation at Work: Defending Day Labor in Los
This may be especially so in the carceral context. The Supreme Court’s landmark 2011 decision in Brown v. Plata367 came only after twenty years
of litigation and more than seventy federal court orders mandating institutional reform failed to generate anything like constitutional conditions in the California prison system’s medical and mental health delivery systems.368
That the procedures ensuring a boundary between K6G and GP have become such a seamless feature of life in the Jail is a tribute both to the commitment of the Jail’s command staff to the safety of some of its most vulnerable prisoners, and to the ongoing attention the ACLU of Southern California continues to pay to conditions in the Jail. It does not take away from this accomplishment to suggest that it could well have been otherwise, that monitoring and compliance might have been less comprehensive and less lasting than has been the case. Quite the opposite: it suggests that both institutions—the Jail and the ACLU—deserve credit for their continued commitment to the terms of the order and to the K6G program in general.
Even if the Jail’s compliance with the consent decree could not be fairly thought fortuitous, it would still be accurate to regard life in K6G as an instance of accidental humanity. K6G was originally conceived as a space where its target populations could be free from rape and other forms of sexual assault. No one could have predicted what actually emerged: a unit free not only from sexual violence but from the whole edifice of gang politics and hypermasculine performance that too often combine to make life in the Jail’s GP a daily hell for so many people. The comparative humanity of K6G stems from this broader difference, which is the happy byproduct of a set of constitutive features that were as contingent as they are welcome.