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Criminal Justice

Connecting California: Turn a notorious California jail into a center for democracy


The jail symbolizes how L.A. became “the carceral capital of the world,” as UCLA scholar Kelly Lytle Hernandez has put it. Even before it was a big city, L.A. was a pioneer in caging people — the Indigenous, Chinese migrants, white vagrants, Mexican migrants, and Black people.  

The jail symbolizes how L.A. became “the carceral capital of the world,” as UCLA scholar Kelly Lytle Hernandez has put it. Even before it was a big city, L.A. was a pioneer in caging people — the Indigenous, Chinese migrants, white vagrants, Mexican migrants, and Black people.