John Horton was held in solitary confinement in the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail following his arrest for drug possession. He committed suicide.

In the days leading up to his death in March 2009, jail staff noted that Mr. Horton was despondent. His cell was a dimly-lit, windowless, solid-front box the size of a closet. His body was already stiff by the time security staff discovered him hanging from a noose in his cell, with his hands bound - one of eight successful apparent suicides in the L.A. County jails in the past calendar year.

Shortly after the suicide, the ACLU received a letter from an inmate in an adjacent cell describing Horton's obviously disturbed behavior and repeated suicidal gestures, which deputies had witnessed in the days before his death. The ACLU demanded that the County investigate.

The Office of Independent Review (OIR) for Los Angeles County conducted an independent investigation into the 22-year-old's death, and recently released its explosive and damning findings. These findings underscore the urgency of the ACLU's efforts to address the horrific conditions and abuses in Men's Central Jail, where as many as 50 percent of the detainees are mentally ill.

The OIR's July 19, 2010, report confirmed that the sheriff's deputies knew Horton was despondent. Deputies were tasked with checking on him at frequent intervals, but during the hours leading up to his death, the requisite checks were not made. The deputy in charge of supervising Horton had been largely absent from his post: He went to the staff gym to work out, he took a shower, he even went to a nearby restaurant for a 'chow run' with his supervisor's approval. The OIR report noted that the subsequent autopsy on Horton showed internal bruising from injuries incurred before the hanging.

In a cover-up after the suicide, at least 10 deputies engaged in a deliberate, systematic faking of surveillance logs. According to the report, the deputies created fake bar codes to circumvent a jail policy requiring deputies to document their periodic 'welfare checks' on inmates, by scanning bar code plaques mounted at each end of every cell row. Ironically, the scanning system had been implemented to deter ''after the fact' efforts to doctor welfare check logs after something 'bad' such as suicide had occurred', according to the report.

The deputies' actions 'were overt and premeditated and demonstrated a wholesale failure' to carry out their duty 'to diligently watch over and provide safety and security for the inmates under his or her supervision' - a failure, the report noted, which might have facilitated Horton's suicide. The OIR report concluded that during its nine years of oversight of L.A. County Jails, it had found evidence of a 'sub environment in which outlier cultures can fester and cause deputies to lose their way and sense of mission.'

The OIR report substantiates similar findings in an annual report on conditions in the jails released in May 2010 by the ACLU of Southern California and the ACLU National Prison Project, which serve as official monitors of the L.A. County jails.

- Margaret Winter, ACLU National Prison Project

Dear Lindsay,

We know that going to jail is scary. But we can assure you that your experience at the women's facility in Lynwood, outside Los Angeles, is likely to be starkly different from the thousands of others serving time and awaiting trial in the Los Angeles jails. Based on the ACLU's decades of experience as an official court-appointed monitor of the jails, and the stories of countless women with whom we've spoken, the facility where you are staying is an overcrowded detention facility where women are needlessly humiliated for so long that they come to expect sub-human treatment.

It's a place where an eight month pregnant woman was forced to sleep on the floor because she could not access the top bunk to which she was assigned. A place where women have said they are made to stand naked while menstruating, as they waited for jail-issued clothes. And a place where women routinely tell us they cannot get access to the same medications they took in the community (though we doubt that you will face this same problem.)

Group punishments and degrading group strip searches are routine, as are reports of deputies calling women 'bitches' and other derogatory names. And while you get private visits with your family and friends, every other woman's visitors must wait in long lines on the weekends.

We know from the more than 4,500 complaints we receive annually that the women's facility is a lot nicer than the Men's Central Jail - where rats roam the tiers, and violence is as routine as sunshine in California. We've seen men with broken legs and black eyes. It's not uncommon for a prisoner to be thrown up against the wall or punched, simply for asking a deputy a question. In May of this year, the ACLU's National Prison Project and the ACLU of Southern California - which jointly serve as official jail monitors - released a joint report that documents a prisoner's experience in which deputies severely beat him and threatened him if he should report it. He said he was returning from meeting with his attorney, when a few deputies surrounded him and started kicking and hitting him. They bruised his nose and forehead, split his lip, and sprained his arm. And there are dozens of stories just like this one.

Lindsay, even though it's going to be difficult for you to be incarcerated even for a few weeks, rest assured that your celebrity is something that we who frequently visit Los Angeles's jails see as an opportunity to draw attention to conditions in the jails. You will have a window into the world of Los Angeles jails, and we hope you will use it to talk to the press about conditions here.