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.
Criminal Justice
Mathews: Turn a notorious 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.
