LOS ANGELES — The federal government started investigating Los Angeles jails in 1996 — back when Bill Clinton was president, the Spice Girls were all the rage, and Tupac Shakur's killing dominated the news.
The U.S. Department of Justice was concerned that mentally ill inmates had been abused or cared for so poorly that their basic constitutional rights were violated. Those concerns led to a lawsuit and years of federal monitoring.
But more than a quarter of a century later, change in the country's largest jail system has been halting at best. In a blistering letter sent late last year to Attorney General Merrick Garland, four U.S. senators described conditions in L.A. County's jails as a "humanitarian crisis" and "appalling." They cited reports of people routinely chained to chairs, denied medications, forced to urinate in sinks and left to sit in their own feces.
