Los Angeles County: a progressive landmark, a blue county and home to the largest jail system in the United States. With 17,000 to 20,000 inmates on average, the L.A. County jail system is an example of how even the cities that are hailed for their progressive policy action still contribute to the problem of mass incarceration that causes widespread violence among Black, Indigenous, Latine and working-class communities.

This contradiction between the city’s progressive image and its harsh realities reveals a troubling truth: while L.A. touts its commitment to progressive values, its practices perpetuate a cycle of violence and disenfranchisement. This violence is not simply a consequence but rather a byproduct of a system that profits from the criminalization of its most vulnerable residents — from 2012 to 2016, the L.A. Police Department levied $19,386,418,544 in bail money.

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The atrocity doesn’t stop there: the jails themselves are riddled with overcrowding, adversely affecting the health of inmates. Despite multiple legal challenges to the inhuman treatment of incarcerated people with mental health issues, jails in the county continue to foster conditions that retraumatize individuals, deny inpatient care and even shackle inmates to tables during required recreational periods — exemplifying the complete disregard for their safety and humanity. 

This violence is, of course, not distributed equally. Compton, a city consisting of a large Black and Latine population, has an incarceration rate of 980 per 100,000 residents, almost twice the California state average. 

Mass incarceration systematically targets Black and Latine communities, continuing a form of racial violence where marginalized communities are subjected to disproportionate violence for the sake of profit. This cycle not only retains harmful stereotypes that perpetuate the continual alienation of these communities but also takes away money from critical areas that actually support them, such as education and housing. 

The conscious choice to uphold this system was particularly evidenced when the L.A. Unified School District recently cut budgets supporting counselors and others who create safe environments for students to fund deploying the police at multiple campuses this year. This exemplified a political trend across California of cracking down on crime rather than investing in institutions that can help prevent crime from happening in the first place. 

These decisions create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the city attempts to address the issue of crime by fighting against it with increased surveillance and punitive measures, rather than addressing the root causes that contribute to why individuals engage in this behavior.

While mass incarceration is not an issue germane to L.A. County, it is important to recognize the ways that even a city often known for its progressive policymaking can still reinforce racist and classist violence for its profit and benefit. For L.A. — and California broadly — to truly become progressive, policymakers must end the system of mass incarceration that disrupts the lives of individuals and communities, instead of hiding behind a blue facade. 

For example, Gov. Gavin Newsom must stop signing and supporting bills that expand crime penalties and prison funding. Newsom recently introduced a ballot measure that could have improved public safety without increasing mass incarceration, succumbing to pressure from GOP state legislators like Sen. Brian Jones who claimed that the proposal was a “​​soft-on-crime ballot measure that undermined our democracy.” All too often, California politicians focus on trying to make marginal improvements in prison culture while ignoring that the real issue lies within the very model within which we pursue justice. 

As students, we need to support and spread awareness of organizations in L.A. that are actively fighting against mass incarceration. Groups such as Million Dollar Hoods, based at UCLA and run by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, collect data on the fiscal costs of the jail and prison system across L.A. and document the disparities that exist within these systems and the effects they have on Black, Indigenous, Latine and working-class communities. 

Other organizations, such as La Defensa, a non-profit based in Southern California, focus on centering human dignity within jails and fighting back against the unjust holding of pretrial individuals, who consist of 44% of the inmate population. Supporting these and other organizations that work to end the system of incarceration that dehumanizes individuals and targets Black and Latine communities — as well as confronting the way many people subconsciously alienate incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals — is necessary for us to make genuine progress. 

We need to pressure political officials not to align themselves with the prison-industrial complex, and to make policy that focuses on investing in communities rather than surveilling them. We must make both ourselves and others aware of this problem and of the organizations helping to lead the fight against it. We have to resist silence in the face of mass incarceration that justifies the continual atrocity that is the L.A. jail and prison system.