Men’s Central Jail faces ‘severe structural damage’ in earthquake, report says

The decaying eyesore that is Men’s Central Jail has sparked an impressively broad array of health and safety concerns in recent years. There were the fires, the rats, the drugs, the mold and the persistent violence, both from staff and inmates.

But a newly resurfaced engineering study reveals another problem: Major structural deficiencies could turn the aging building into a deathtrap in the event of an earthquake.

Completed in 2006, the 72-page county-commissioned study found that the jail suffers from weak walls, inadequate reinforcements and concrete so brittle that it could crack or shatter under pressure.

“These kinds of vulnerabilities would definitely lead to the potential for a fairly catastrophic failure,” said engineer Ryan Wilkerson of Los Angeles-based Nabih Youssef Associates Structural Engineers. After reviewing the report, Wilkerson told The Times that a key concern would be a partial collapse of the jail that could “certainly” kill people. Without more advanced study, a total collapse can’t be ruled out as a possibility, he said.

Like much of downtown, the jail sits on top of the Puente Hills thrust fault system, which experts say is capable of producing a powerful magnitude 7.5 earthquake and is one of the region’s most dangerous fault systems. It is the same system that rattled the region this month, when a magnitude 4.4 quake hit hard enough to shake the inside of the jail.

Fixing the problem, the study said, would require extensive upgrades estimated to cost $464 million a decade ago. Between inflation costs and interest payments, the price tag now probably would be far greater. Yet none of the work has been done — and officials said it’s not on the agenda.

Last year, when The Times asked county officials for a list of aging, at-risk buildings earmarked for seismic retrofitting, Men’s Central Jail wasn’t in the catalog of 33 troubled structures.

In an emailed statement, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said the jail didn’t make the list because the county has long planned to shut it down.

“For many years the County has indicated its desire to replace Men’s Central Jail or to close and demolish the facility without replacement,” the statement said. “Therefore, many of the deferred maintenance needs and expensive building infrastructure replacements have not been funded. Only the routine, day-to-day, maintenance projects were implemented to keep the building functional.”

For people who are held or work in the jail — or advocate for those who do — the report sparked concern, if not exactly surprise.

“The conditions at Men’s Central Jail are abysmal for our deputies who work there and the inmates alike,” said Richard Pippin, president of the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. “To learn that the actual structural integrity of the 60-year-old MCJ is in question is sadly not a surprise.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which resurfaced the 18-year-old report this month, pointed to the seismic risks as more evidence that the facility should be closed.

“It’s easier to ignore the dangers from earthquakes just because they’re so rare,” said Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “But this isn’t an abstract concern, this is a real concern, and the county has just ignored it, and it’s just more evidence of why Men’s Central Jail needs to be shut down.”

Built in 1963 to alleviate overcrowding, the county’s largest jail has long been beset by structural problems and persistent maintenance issues. Oversight inspectors regularly report finding flooded cells, broken toilets and cell doors that won’t open. The heating and cooling systems are so antiquated that in recent years, at least two inmates have died after showing signs of hypothermia.

There are no smoke detectors or sprinkler systems in the inmate housing areas. And the building’s antiquated layout and unmonitored cameras leave blind spots where it’s easy for violence to go unnoticed.

For years, county leaders have talked about getting rid of the facility — sometimes by replacing it with another jail, sometimes by replacing it with a mental health treatment facility and sometimes by simply not replacing it at all. After five years of pursuing the last of those options, this month the Board of Supervisors changed course and started once again discussing possible replacements.

“The pendulum has swung,” Supervisor Holly Mitchell said at a board meeting earlier this month. “We keep saying: When are you closing Men’s Central Jail? I think there needs to be an ‘And what are we building or creating for this population that perhaps pretrial, diversion, community settings won’t match?’”

The 2006 study grew out of a prior effort to address the county’s changing carceral needs, though at the time the plan was to explore adding high-security beds to the facility. The L.A. County Department of Public Works tasked gkkworks with completing a feasibility study — and the result revealed a host of seismic failings.

One of the biggest has to do with the concrete construction.

Nonductile concrete buildings — such as Men’s Central Jail — were common in the 1950s and 1960s. Generally speaking, the structures don’t have enough steel reinforcing bars to prevent concrete from exploding out of the building’s columns when an earthquake hits. This flaw, now well known, was identified after the 1971 Sylmar quake.

During that magnitude 6.6 earthquake, two concrete structures at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Fernando collapsed and 49 people died. Concrete stairwells and buildings on a hospital campus in Sylmar also collapsed, and three people died.

Afterward, non-ductile concrete structures were deemed so hazardous that their construction was banned.

But Men’s Central Jail was built well before that, and Wilkerson said the feasibility study “describes the building with all the classical, nonductile concrete issues that we are concerned about,” including a “lack of general strength.”

The fact that Men’s Central Jail withstood that shaking — as well as the later 1994 Northridge earthquake — does not mean it will escape damage in the future. Both earthquakes were centered in the San Fernando Valley, and by the time shaking arrived downtown, it was considerably weaker.

Aside from the concrete concerns, the 2006 report also lays out a variety of other “undesirable structural attributes” that it says “would result in significant-to-severe structural damage in the event of a major seismic disturbance.”

The building’s walls and columns are overstressed, which means they may not be able to support the floors above them. The ground floor — which has some windows — is relatively flimsy compared with the upper floors. And there’s what is now known as a design flaw involving columns that are too short on the second and third floors, which pose a significant hazard.

In addition to the problems identified in the study, Men’s Central Jail, like large swaths of the L.A. Basin, sits in what’s known as a liquefaction zone. Liquefaction occurs when shaking from an earthquake effectively turns the land into quicksand. Typically this happens in places where the ground is made of loose sand or silt and filled with groundwater — such as near rivers, like the one a few hundred feet from Men’s Central Jail.

Liquefaction can cause structures to tilt, or it can lead to a more dramatic phenomenon known as lateral spreading, in which buildings on suddenly fluid soil slide down gentle slopes, such as toward river banks.

There’s no mention of those possibilities in the feasibility study, but Wilkerson said that’s because it came out before liquefaction zone maps were better understood.

“We know now,” Wilkerson said, “that the river basin downtown has a high groundwater table and a really granular type of soil, so there’s a zone in this downtown region where liquefaction is a potential.”

When that happens, he explained, buildings can start to settle “in very uneven ways” — one part might settle 6 inches, while another section might not settle at all. “That’s a type of seismic vulnerability,” he added.

Fixing the problems would — predictably — be expensive and logistically challenging. The study includes a four-page list of proposed seismic upgrades, such as adding 2-foot-thick reinforced concrete shear walls extending from the foundation to the roof, putting supportive “jackets” around the existing columns, and adding a variety of reinforced concrete beams and flanged buttress walls. For the jail’s infirmary, there are options including adding new steel-braced frames.

Achieving any of that probably would require vacating all or part of the facility for several years, the study said. And, although completing the minimal work needed to achieve a “life safety” level of seismic performance was estimated to cost around $251 million if it started in 2006, more expansive changes required to prevent death and keep the building habitable in the event of a major quake would have cost more than $303 million at the time.

In the meantime, the building continues to shake.

One former jail employee — who asked not to be named due to pending litigation — told The Times she was doing rounds when a quake hit sometime around 2019. She described feeling a jolt before the facility went on lockdown. And although no one was hurt, the incident served as a reminder of how old and decrepit the facility was. She said that afterward her “greatest fear” was that the jail’s floors would cave in.

A defense lawyer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak on the record, described being in the jail when the magnitude 4.4 earthquake shook the jail earlier this month.

“There was a loud boom, and then the interview cubicles started to rattle very, very heavily, and, honestly it felt like they might collapse,” the attorney said.

If that happens, Kendrick, the ACLU lawyer, warned that the county could face significant and costly liability in court — especially since county leaders were alerted to the problems nearly two decades ago.

“The legal concept with cases involving prisons and jails is deliberate indifference, and whether government officials are aware of a substantial risk of serious harm to incarcerated people,” she said.

“Something like this is the paradigmatic example of substantial risk of serious harm,” Kendrick continued, “and the failure of the county to act for almost 20 years is the textbook definition of deliberate indifference.”