security inmates. north facility is a modern-looking maximum security jail. east facility, or old max, is the oldest jail in los angeles. and lastly, the crown jewel of the l.a. county jail system is the north county correctional facility, or nccf, which houses murderers, rapists, and drug offenders. we find that the linear style jail really doesn t work for us anymore, and what we have here is we have more of a podular design with the staff stations in the middle and then the inmates around the outside. a single facility comprised of five jails housing 3,800 inmates, nccf was designed in 1983. nccf first made headlines in march of 1990, when the first president bush helped dedicate the jail s opening. one of this nation s founding fathers said, if men were angels, no government would be
it s important because it teaches an individual to take control of their own lives. it gives them life skills ab fundamentals that allows them to take control of their own life. you need an investment in education. a real investment in it. you ll need strong, fair, just law enforcement. what i m saying here is you need a balance. you must put it into the education but you also must deal with the situations. that s a fair way of putting it. the rate of racially based disturbances like this one, captured on surveillance video, used to be about one per month. but jail officials claim that the amer-i-can program has drastically reduced the number of incidents throughout the jail. there s a certain rule that blacks stay with blacks,
it s something, you know, you just have to put up with that. you know, i did it to myself again. i said i wasn t coming back. here i am. same people, same everything. just like i ve seen people come in and out, there s people that come in and see me come and go. it s a headache all the way around. will williamson s outlook on being in jail is much different now than it was when he was first locked up at age 14. i m more accepting now. before when i did something it wasn t my fault. but i ve learned to know and to realize that i did wrong because it s something that i wanted to do. and instead of coming in here and blaming the officers for it, i hold myself responsible for what i ve done. just down the road from east is north facility. north was built in 1987 at a cost of $41 million and is a maximum security jail primarily for younger inmates. from the outside the jail looks
riots that l.a. county jail has ever seen. the fighting finally ended when the sheriff s emergency response teams were brought in. using verbal commands, stingball grenades, and pepper spray, sheriff deputies were able to prevent the inmates from killing each other, except for one inmate whose injuries left him in a coma, most of the men involved in the riots suffered minor injuries. jail is completely different than what it was 30 years ago. for one thing, we have much more violence-prone inmates in our system. in the past that was never a problem. we did not have the major riots and the disturbances. 30-year veteran of the sheriff s department and commander of nccf john vanderhoerk blames the growing trend of violence in jail on the state prison gangs. we have inmates who are trying to establish their reputation, knowing that they are going to the state prison
often when inmates leave l.a. county jail they encounter problems getting a job due to lack of occupational skills. without a job most inmates quickly fall back into a life of crime, which is why the vocational programs available at l.a. county jail are always filled with inmates. the inmates that work in the vocational print shop consider this to be more a job and not actually working at jail. regardless of their crime, all inmates are offered the chance to work while in jail. we don t assign them to work with anyone. we don t assign them what machines they re going to be on. we let them make all their decisions. they made decisions for their life. this is part of their life.