The Reform LA Jails project promotes left-of-center criminal justice and corrections policies in Los Angeles County, California. It sponsored a successful 2020 county-level ballot initiative to give the Los Angeles County Civilian Oversight Commission subpoena power to investigate alleged misconduct by sheriff’s deputies in county jails and require the county to develop a plan to divert billions of dollars in funding from police and jails into “alternatives to incarceration.” ^{[1] [2]}

Reform LA Jails was founded and is led by Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, who said her brother Rodney O. Cullors had been “tortured and brutalized” in the Los Angeles County Jail by sheriff’s deputies in 1999. ^[3] He was again an inmate in the Los Angeles County Jail in April 2020 when Reform LA Jails filed an unsuccessful lawsuit on his and other inmates’ behalf seeking their release from jail during the COVID-19 pandemic.

History and Leadership

Reform LA Jails was founded by Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. ^[4] It grew out of JusticeLA, an organization founded by Cullors and other left-wing activists in 2017 to oppose the expansion of the Los Angeles County Jail. ^{[5] [6]}

Activities

2020 Ballot Proposal

Reform LA Jails’ first initiative was a successful Los Angeles County ballot proposal to give the county’s Civilian Oversight Commission the power to subpoena witnesses and documents from the Sheriff’s Department. ^[7] Despite claims that it was “powered by Black Lives Matter, community organizations, and grassroots citizens,” ^[8] more than half of the funding for the “Yes on R” ballot campaign came from left-of-center donor Cari Tuna, the wife of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. ^[9]

Los Angeles County’s legal counsel advised local officials that the subpoena power would have no meaningful effect as the Civilian Oversight Commission already had access under law to all publicly available information about sheriff’s department activities, but that California law banned the use of subpoenas by public bodies to gain access to non-public information. ^[10]

The ballot proposal also required the county to develop a “feasibility study” to restructure the county’s criminal justice system under a left-of-center model of ending incarceration for “nonviolent crimes where mental health, substance abuse and chronic homelessness are issues” and redirecting funding from law enforcement and jails to mental health programs, youth outreach, drug treatment, and similar programs. ^[11]

The ballot measure received the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, and of celebrity supporters such as actresses Natalie Portman and Jane Fonda, who hosted a Reform LA Jails party at her home in 2019. ^{[12] [13] [14]} It was approved by voters in May 2020 by a 72.8% to 27.2% margin. ^[15]

COVID-19 Lawsuit against Los Angeles County Sheriff

The month after the passage of Proposal R, Reform LA Jails launched the “JusticeLA COVID-19 Response,” which filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) and Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, seeking the release of a large population of inmates from county jails to protect prisoners from COVID-19. ^[16]

Patrisse Cullors’ brother Rodney O. Cullors was the lead named plaintiff in the lawsuit. In an April 2020 court filing in a related case, Cullors testified that he had been incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail since February 2019 “because I can’t afford to pay my bail.” ^[17] He claimed that chronic health conditions, including hypertension, heart problems, spinal damage, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and manic depression, put him at increased risk from COVID-19 infection.

The LASD’s response to the lawsuit noted that there had not been a single COVID-19 death in the Los Angeles County Jail when the lawsuit was filed, and that the coronavirus infection rate among jail inmates at the time was lower than community infection rates in Los Angeles County as a whole. ^[18] The LASD also warned that the requested court orders had the potential to create dangerous situations in the jails by interfering with corrections best practices such as rules that kept members of rival criminal gangs from being housed in the same cells. ^[19]

Reform LA Jails and its allies voluntarily dismissed the case on April 27, 2020 – only three days after it was originally filed – after similar lawsuits from other plaintiffs were rejected by the California Supreme Court and a federal district judge. ^{[20] [21]} Despite the dismissal, Reform LA Jails continued to promote itself as “taking Sheriff Alex Villanueva and the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors to court,” using a September 2020 video narrated by Hollywood celebrities such as Natalie Portman, Gabrielle Union, Joaquin Phoenix and Mahershala Ali to encourage people to sign up as “citizen plaintiffs,” a term with no legal meaning. ^{[22] [23]}

Associations

Reform LA Jails is part of the Justice Teams Network, a project of Tides Advocacy to promote left-of-center criminal justice policy proposals such as defunding police departments and repealing legal protections for police officers. ^{[24] [25]} Patrisse Cullors is a “Strategic Advisor” to Justice Teams Network. ^[26]

Reform LA Jails is also part of the national effort to elect left-wing Democratic district attorneys across the country, which has received significant funding from financier George Soros. ^[27] In 2020, successful left-wing Los Angeles County District Attorney challenger George Gascon (D) received millions of dollars in donation from Soros and from Patty Quillin, wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and a major supporter of Reform LA Jails’ ballot campaign. ^[28] Chloe Cockburn, the director of criminal justice reform for the Open Philanthropy Project Fund, credited Reform LA Jails and Justice LA with leading “the effort to elect a long-shot district attorney candidate against a police-union-backed incumbent.” ^[29]

Controversies

In July 2020, while she was leading Reform LA Jails, Cullors was named Executive Director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. ^[30] In May 2021, Cullors stepped down from her role at the Foundation after media reports that she had purchased $3.2 million worth of properties across the country since 2016, and other questions were raised about whether she had directed contracts to a company owned by the father of her child. ^{[31] [32]}

In April 2021, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported on campaign filings from the “Yes on R” committee showing that Reform LA Jails had paid Cullors’ consulting firm a total of $191,000 in 2019. ^[33] Reform LA Jails called media reports on Cullors’ compensation and investments “a direct attempt to undermine and derail the success of our work” ^[34] and claimed she had earned a “market rate salary,” despite being paid through a consultancy instead of as a salaried employee. ^[35]

In 2019, under Cullors’ leadership, Reform LA Jails received a formal warning from the California Fair Political Practices Commission for violating the California Political Reform Act by failing to file required campaign financial statements on time. ^[36]

Reform LA Jails was also criticized for spending more than $25,000 on “meetings and appearances” at an upscale Malibu beach resort in 2019, funneling the money through a consultancy owned by Cullors’ co-author Asha Bandele. ^{[37] [38]}

Funding

Reform LA Jails and its “Yes on R” ballot campaign have received significant funding from major left-of-center donors.

The Open Philanthropy Project Fund‘s public database lists listing four donations either by the fund or from organizations it advises totaling $2,341,000 from April 2018 through February 2020. ^[39] Tides Advocacy reported donating $320,000 to Reform LA Jails on its 2018 tax return. ^[40]

Liberal criminal justice policy advocates Patty Quillin and Quinn Delaney provided $390,000 and $275,000 respectively. ^{[41] [42] [43]} Entertainment company Live Nation provided $250,000, ^[44] while Mark Heising and Elizabeth Simons of the Heising-Simons Foundation contributed $150,000. ^[45]