L.A. has run out of time to fix its own jails (LATimes editorial)

It should come as no surprise that Los Angeles County's treatment of mentally ill jail inmates falls so short of acceptable standards that theU.S. Department of Justice is seeking federal court oversight. County officials did too little for too long to correct egregious problems. Recent efforts to improve jail management and to identify and better serve mentally ill and suicidal inmates came too late.

County leaders may be tempted to argue that Friday's notice from the Justice Department shows that they were right to move ahead with a plan to raze the decrepit and rat-infested Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles and to build a more modern and humane facility in which mentally ill inmates would be better treated.
A better lesson would be that for nearly two decades, the county has moved at an unnecessarily glacial pace in responding to long-standing concerns about poor treatment of incarcerated people who more properly should have been treated as patients in medical and mental health treatment facilities. In their report to the county Friday, federal officials cited 15 suicides in the jails in less than 30 months, called conditions for the mentally ill "deplorable" and described jail cells as "dimly lit, vermin-infested, noisy, unsanitary, cramped and crowded."

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-jail-20140608-story.html