Los Angeles County government faces annual political debates over the distribution of resources between its public hospital safety net and its vast jail system. For almost three decades policy-makers have grappled with chronically overcrowded jails and hospitals. This project is an archival examination of policy-making concerning jail and public hospital overcrowding in Los Angeles County from 1978 to 2010. It asks the following research question: What changing ideological understandings of poverty might have informed local decision-making to expand and contract hospital and jail beds, shift who gets to sleep in them, and for how long they get to sleep in them? The term "ideological understandings of poverty" makes reference to conceptions about what types of poor people are programs meant to target, what assumptions about their behavior are they meant to correct, and who is and is not eligible for criminal justice and public hospital engagement.
The project utilizes archival sources in the form of memos between county administrators and their advisory staff, communication between department heads, consulted reports and studies used to inform policy, meeting minutes, relevant newspaper clippings, and publicity actions. These sources document legislative intent as it evolved in real-time around county crisis events, pilot projects, and other efforts to solve the social problem of hospital and jail overcrowding. The project aims to inform policy-makers regarding their attempts to tackle overcrowding, to engage theory on the deserving and undeserving poor, and to answer recent calls for scholarship that considers the interaction between criminal justice and social welfare policy in contemporary urban America.
The grant supported 12-months of data collection from policy documents concerning Los Angeles County's criminal justice and health systems from 1978-2011. The goal of the project is to understand how the building and closure of jails and hospitals interacts in ways unappreciated by historians and public policy scholars. The broader impact of this project is to provide insight into the numerous jurisdictions now grappling with prison/jail and hospital overcrowding. These policy domains have traditionally been dealt with as separate problems, when, as this research demonstrates, they are linked problems and considering them as such provides innovative policy solutions. Archival research was conducted at four sites. Much of the policy documents are taken from the donated library papers of former members of the Board of Supervisors of Los Angeles County. At the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA the papers of former supervisor Edemend D. Edelman were exhausted. The papers of former supervisor Kenneth Hahn, located in the same library, were only partially sourced. The grant author will need to go back to finish sourcing the Hahn files. The papers of Yvonne Burke, held at the USC Doheny Memorial Library in Los Angeles, were exhausted. Grant money was also used to source material from the California state archives. While the archival material is still being analyzed, there are some preliminary project outcomes. First, throughout the period county officials were cognizant of their primary budget position: expanding the county's vast jail and police system at the expense of its public hospital and clinic system. Second, during deliberations to build both types of facilities officials underemphasized ongoing operating costs. Third, throughout the period, county officials produced and marketed generalizations about criminals and public hospital patients in order to help justify their various budget decisions. Third, the data offers unique insight into how the county came to its current budgetary position of having to systematically release prisoner’s early and long public hospital waiting lines.
