OC Jails By Steve Greenhut.

[Gladiator]

Moorlach staff demands good PR! * posted by Steven Greenhut
<http://orangepunch.freedomblogging.com/author/sgreenhut/>


I took a recent (April 14) PR tour of the Theo Lacy jail with Sheriff's
Department officials and two members of Supervisor John Moorlach's
staff. This is interesting because Sheriff Hutchens - in her rebuttal to
a Register editorial about her denial of a deputies code of silence -
wrote that "Repeated invitations to your staff to come over and see,
point by point, all of the changes we have implemented have been
ignored. That invitation remains open and unanswered." That letter was
written a couple of weeks after my tour, and the sheriff personally
approved my attendance on the tour according to Supervisor Moorlach's
Chief of Staff Mario Mainero, so I'm not quite sure why she claims that
no one from the Register has come and taken a look at departmental
changes. I would guess that other Register writers have been there also.
Then again, Sheriff Hutchens has shown a disturbing tendency to be a
spin- meister rather than a truth-teller.
<It turns out that Sandra Hutchens is another lying Sheriff | Orange Juice! Politics For The Rest Of Us.
-another-lying-sheriff/>

The problem, I suppose, is that I have not yet written the expected
favorable article about the visit. Although the Hutchens PR folks have
been pros, the Moorlach folks have twice questioned my motives - not for
anything I've written, but for not having done the PR gig for Hutchens.
I've never taken a PR tour and confronted such blatant demands for
positive publicity. I am indeed planning to write about jail reform
again, and will do so once I sort through both sides. My initial leaning
is that some real improvements have taken place, and those deserve to be
commended. Other sources, however, claim that only superficial
improvements have taken place - and I'm trying to sort through the
issue.

Most confusing, though, is the sheriff repeatedly denies that there are
cultural problems in the department and has recently lashed out against
the DA's office for pointing to a deputy code of silence in the case of
a deputy who was being prosecuted for abusing a Taser
<http://blog.ocsd.org/post/2009/04/24...ponds-to-Code-
of-Silence-Claims.aspx> . If there's no problem, then how could serious
reform have taken place? In the sheriff's view, the only problem that
ever existed in the department was that a handful of deputies misbehaved
in a handful of cases. Yet a number of serious and wide-ranging cases,
ranging from the Chamberlain murder to the Stenger incident (alleged
cover up of a fellow deputy accused of molestation), all have the code
of silence as a common thread. If Hutchens is right, then Carona ran a
good department, and she merely had to root out a couple of bad apples
once he and Jack Anderson left.

When I toured the jail (albeit on a planned visit in which deputies
throughout the jail were warned of my group's tour), I was told about
reduced wait times for inmates' visitors. A group of inmates we spoke to
said that deputies have been far nicer than they had been under Mike
Carona's leadership. There are still shot callers, they said, but they
don't run the jail like they did before. There's no TV in the guard
station any more (will wonders never cease?). The inmates did confirm
that deputies had been abusive in the past. This information definitely
is encouraging, but not conclusive.

Yet one reader sent me this email from Moorlach Deputy Chief of Staff
Rick Francis, a probation official who spent some of his tour time
schmoozing with his past associates at the jail: "I did ask Mr.
Greenhut after our visit if he planned to write anything positive about
what he saw. His silence speaks volumes..." What speaks volumes is the
way the Moorlach office defensively supports everything the sheriff does
(including its heavyhanded security tactics and efforts to undermine the
Second Amendment in the county) and attributes ill motives to those who
don't jump on the bandwagon. One would think that the Moorlach staff
would be supportive of some things and critical of other things in the
department. Instead they've gone into full-defense mode for the
sheriff's department for transparently political reasons - to justify
the supervisor's instrumental role in Hutchens' appointment. Power and
politics do funny things to people, however, even to the incorruptible
John Moorlach!