Justice Department says L.A. County jails failing suicidal inmates

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Justice Department says L.A. County jails failing suicidal inmates

By Dan Whitcomb LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Department of Justice has determined that Los Angeles County's jails violate the Constitution by failing to provide adequate mental health services to suicidal inmates, the latest black mark to the nation's already troubled largest jail system. The Justice Department, making its latest report this week in a 2002 agreement with the county to monitor its jails, found that there had been 15 suicides at its lockups in the past 30 months, some of them preventable with proper mental health practices. "The Los Angeles County jails have an obligation to provide conditions of confinement that do not offend the Constitution and to take reasonable measures to protect inmates from harm," said Jocelyn Samuels, acting assistant attorney general for the department's Civil Rights Division. The DOJ proposed entering into a new court agreement with the county to protect the mentally ill at the sprawling jail system, which houses some 19,000 prisoners and is operated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

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