MCJ, as many dub it, is a cauldron of racial tension where violence is easily stirred by a fluctuating daily population of 3,900 to 4,700 inmates packed in close quarters.
But among the roughly 400 people housed in “K6G,” the gay wing of Men’s Central Jail, there’s little outward expression of racial prejudice or gang rivalry. “If you were going to smuggle something in, it would be dresses and bras.” Inmates in these three open-plan dorms don’t worry much about the gang politics and violence among the “general population.”ĭuncan Roy, a gay British film producer who was held in K6G for 89 days without bail in 2012, under ex–Sheriff Lee Baca’s controversial interpretation of “immigration holds,” recalls, “In other parts of the jail, you try and smuggle in drugs and cigarettes. The gay wing at Men’s Central Jail is an exceptionally rare, if not unique, subculture, the only environment of its kind in a major U.S. Nothing like it exists in America’s 21 largest urban jails, all contacted by the Weekly, where officials described in far more modest terms their own steps to deal with and house gay inmates. San Francisco has a transgender housing area, but gay inmates live among the general population. In New York’s Rikers Island, whose similar gay wing was shuttered in 2005, a jail spokesman laughed out loud, saying that whoever decides which men get placed in L.A.
