VIDEO: Mother's Day Action Outside Men's Central Jail

Watch to hear from JusticeLA mothers who spent this past Mother’s Day advocating for their loved ones who died in L.A. County custody.

June 10, 2026

This past Mother’s Day, mothers from Justice LA advocated outside Men's Central Jail for their loved ones who died in L.A. County custody. Here’s a timeline of our collective fight against the deadly L.A. County Jails system:

  • In 1975, in Rutherford v. Pitchess, the ACLU SoCal exposed horrific conditions at the L.A. County Jails so dire that they violated the Constitution. The judge in the case, William Gray, issued a historic decision that largely agreed. Gray died in 1992, but the Rutherford case unfortunately lived on.
  • Thirty years later, in 2005, the ACLU SoCal filed court documents saying L.A. County was defying the Rutherford decision, especially in the Inmate Reception Center (IRC) where “thirty to forty men [were] being crammed into holding cells so small they must take turns lying down on the hard, filthy floor,” with no access to showers or regular meals.
  • In 2017, L.A. County formed workgroups to plan care-first alternatives to incarceration after community pressure including from the newly formed JusticeLA Coalition. Three years later, in 2020, the county’s Board of Supervisors (L.A. BoS) voted to close Men’s Central Jail within a year.
  • In 2022, the ACLU SoCal found conditions had worsened in the IRC: people defecating in trash cans and urinating on the floor, no access to showers or clean clothes for days, and lack of adequate access to drinking water, food and health care, including failure to provide people with serious medical conditions their medications.

Today, JLA sent a letter to the L.A. BoS about their lack of MCJ closure progress, transparency, and accountability.

We join JLA in urging that the L.A. BoS follow through on their promise of “care first, jails last” and fund the first year of a proposed plan to decarcerate and ultimately close Men’s Central Jail.

People in custody deserve humane treatment and should not be subjected to unlawful, horrific and deadly conditions and violence. Watch the video below from Justice LA mothers to learn more about who their sons were and why their lives mattered.