Eight jailers at a beleaguered downtown Los Angeles jail were watching porn when they overlooked a noose hanging in the jail cell of a suicidal inmate, a new inspection report said.
The jailers — LA County Sheriff’s deputies — were caught during a recent inspection of “1750 Unit” at downtown’s Men’s Central Jail, which inspectors noted was extremely hot and humid with no natural light, had trash in the hallways and a whole host of other problems, according to the report by Haley Broder and Eric Miller, commissioners with the LA County Sybil Brand Commission on Institutional Inspections.
“To me, it looked like the beginning of an OnlyFans video or something,” Miller told the LA Times. “It was women in underwear, and it certainly didn’t look like they were going to put more clothes on. It looked like they were going to take them off.”
Broder told The Times the conditions in the lockup were terrible.
“There was just continuous neglect and bad conditions,” she said. “People were saying they were hungry. We saw people with giant open wounds. The trash was just everywhere — there’s so much trash. It smells. There are fires. And it seems, in general, there is just a genuine lack of interest in changing that situation.”
The porn watching came to light as commissioners conducting the inspection discovered a “self-constructed noose” hanging from the ceiling of a cell.
“Though unlikely to support the incarcerated person’s weight, the noose was obvious to anyone looking into the cell and its presence was consistent with the suicidal ideation articulated by the incarcerated person while taking his shower,” the report said.
When the commissioners reported the noose to deputies — eight of whom were sitting in an office watching a video on a large-screen TV — they said they’d check on the cell later and continued watching the video, the report said.
The commissioners left, completed their inspection of the various rows in the unit and returned to the office where the deputies remained watching a “sexually explicit video on their wide-screen television,” the report said.
It was only when a female commissioner walked in that “the deputies hurriedly removed the video from the screen.”
Hellbound and Down 