Report: Los Angeles Jail Faces 'Severe Structural Damage' From Earthquake

The ugly picture of the Central Men's Prison has raised a wide range of health and safety concerns in recent years. Fires, rats, drugs, mold, and ongoing violence, both from staff and prisoners, have all been reported.

But a recent engineering study has revealed another problem: major structural flaws could turn the old building into a death trap in the event of an earthquake.

The county-commissioned study, completed in 2006, found that the jail had weak walls, inadequate reinforcement, and very brittle concrete that could crack or shatter under pressure.

“These kinds of vulnerabilities would certainly create the potential for a catastrophic failure to some degree,” said Ryan Wilkerson, a structural engineer with the Los Angeles-based firm Nabih Yousef Associates. After reviewing the report, Wilkerson told The Times that a major concern would be a partial collapse of the prison, which would “definitely” kill people. He added that without a more advanced study, a complete collapse could not be ruled out as a possibility.

Like much of downtown, the prison sits atop the Puente Hills fault system, which experts say is capable of producing a 7.5-magnitude earthquake, one of the most dangerous fault systems in the region. It’s the same fault system that shook the area earlier this month, when a 4.4-magnitude quake struck the prison with enough force to shake the inside of the facility.

Fixing the problem would require extensive upgrades that cost an estimated $464 million a decade ago, the study says. Between inflation and interest payments, the cost is likely to be much higher now. Yet none of that work has been done yet — and officials say it’s not on the agenda.

Last year, when The Times asked county officials for a list of aging buildings at risk and designated for seismic maintenance, the Maine Central Jail was not on the list of 33 at risk.

In an emailed statement, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said the prison was not on the list because the county had long planned to close it.

“The county has indicated for many years that it wants to replace the Central Men’s Jail or close and demolish the facility without replacing it,” the statement said. “As a result, many of the building’s deferred maintenance needs and expensive infrastructure replacements have not been funded. Only routine, daily maintenance projects have been performed to keep the building usable.”

For people who are detained or work in prisons — or advocates for those who do — the report has raised concerns, if not exactly surprise.

“The conditions at the Central Men’s Jail are deplorable for both our deputies who work there and the inmates,” said Richard Pepin, president of the Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff’s Association. “It’s sadly not a surprise to learn that the physical integrity of the 60-year-old Central Men’s Jail is in question.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which republished the 18-year-old report this month, pointed to the seismic risks as further evidence that the facility should be closed.

“It’s easy to ignore the risks from earthquakes because they’re so rare,” said Corinne Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “But this isn’t an abstract concern, it’s a real concern, and the county has ignored it, and this is just more evidence that Maine Central needs to close.”

Built in 1963 to relieve overcrowding, the county’s largest jail has long suffered from structural and maintenance problems. Inspectors regularly report finding flooded cells, broken toilets and cell doors that won’t open. The heating and cooling systems are so outdated that in recent years, at least two inmates have died after showing signs of hypothermia.

There are no smoke detectors or sprinkler systems in the prisoner housing areas. The building's outdated design and unmonitored cameras leave blind spots where violence can easily go unnoticed.

For years, county leaders have talked about getting rid of the facility — sometimes by replacing it with another jail, sometimes by replacing it with a mental health treatment facility and sometimes by not replacing it at all. After five years of pursuing the last of those options, the Board of Supervisors changed course this month and began discussing potential alternatives again.

“The pendulum has swung,” Superintendent Holly Mitchell said at a board meeting earlier this month. “We keep saying, ‘When are you going to close the men’s central jail?’ I think it’s important to have a ‘What are we building or innovating for this population that maybe pretrial or diversionary or community settings don’t match?”

The 2006 study grew out of an earlier effort to address the county’s changing jail needs, though the plan at the time was to explore adding high-security beds to the existing facility. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Works commissioned GKK Works to complete the feasibility study—and the results revealed a host of seismic failures.

One of the biggest problems is related to concrete construction.

Non-ductile concrete buildings—such as the Central Men's Jail—were common in the 1950s and 1960s. These structures generally did not have enough steel bars to prevent the concrete from bursting out of the building's columns in an earthquake. This now-famous flaw was identified after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.

During that 6.6-magnitude quake, two concrete structures collapsed at a Veterans Administration hospital in San Fernando, killing 49 people. Concrete staircases and buildings also collapsed on a hospital campus in Sylmar, killing three people.

After that, non-ductile concrete structures were considered too dangerous, so their construction was banned.

But the Central Men's Prison was built much earlier, and Wilkerson said the feasibility study “describes a building with all the classic non-ductile concrete problems that concern us,” including “lack of overall strength.”

The fact that Maine Central Prison withstood that earthquake—as well as the 1994 Northridge earthquake—doesn’t mean it will survive future damage. Both quakes were centered in the San Fernando Valley, and by the time the quake reached downtown, it had weakened considerably.

Beyond the concrete concerns, the 2006 report also includes a variety of other “undesirable structural features” that it says “could lead to significant to severe structural damage in the event of a major seismic disturbance.”

The building's walls and columns are overstressed, meaning they may not be able to support the floors above them. The ground floor – which contains some windows – is relatively weak compared to the upper floors. There is what is now known as a design flaw regarding the columns being too short on the second and third floors, which poses a significant risk.

In addition to the problems identified in the study, Maine Central, like much of the Los Angeles Basin, is located in what’s known as a liquefaction zone. Liquefaction occurs when the ground is turned into quicksand by the shaking caused by an earthquake. It typically occurs in places where the ground is composed of sand or silt that’s filled with groundwater—such as areas near rivers, like the one just a few hundred feet from Maine Central.

Liquefaction can cause structures to tilt, or it can lead to a more dramatic phenomenon known as “lateral spreading” where buildings on liquid soil suddenly slide down gentle slopes, such as those toward river banks.

These possibilities were not mentioned in the feasibility study, but Wilkerson said that was because it was issued before the liquefaction zone maps were better understood.

“We now know that the river basin in the downtown area has a high groundwater table and a very granular type of soil, so there is an area in the downtown area where liquefaction is likely,” Wilkerson said.

When that happens, he explained, buildings can start settling “in very uneven ways” — one part might settle 6 inches, while another might not settle at all. “That’s a kind of seismic vulnerability,” he added.

Fixing these problems will be expensive and logistically difficult—as expected. The study includes a four-page list of proposals to improve earthquake resistance, such as adding two-foot-thick reinforced concrete shear walls from the foundation to the roof, placing supportive “sleeves” around existing columns, and adding a variety of reinforced concrete beams and retaining walls. For the prison infirmary, options include adding new steel-reinforced frames.

Achieving any of that, the study says, would likely require evacuating all or part of the facility for several years. While the cost of completing the minimum work needed to achieve a “life safety” level of seismic performance was estimated at $251 million if started in 2006, the more comprehensive changes required to prevent deaths and keep the building habitable in the event of a major earthquake would have been more than $303 million at that time.

Meanwhile, the building is still shaking.

One former prison employee — who asked not to be named because of pending litigation — told The Times that she was doing tours when an earthquake struck sometime in 2019. She described feeling shocked before the facility closed. Although no one was injured, the incident served as a reminder of how old and dilapidated the facility was. She said her “biggest fear” afterward was that the prison floors would collapse.

The defense attorney, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, described being in prison when a 4.4-magnitude earthquake struck the facility earlier this month.

“There was a loud bang, and then the interview rooms started shaking so violently, I honestly felt like they were going to collapse,” the lawyer said.

If that happens, Kendrick, the ACLU attorney, warned that the county could face significant and costly liability in court — especially since county leaders were alerted to the problems nearly two decades ago.

“The legal concept in prison cases is deliberate indifference, whether government officials were aware of a substantial risk of serious harm to imprisoned persons,” she said.

“Something like this is the textbook example of a high risk of serious harm, and the county’s failure to act for nearly 20 years is the textbook definition of willful indifference,” Kendrick continued.

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