11-15-2006 California:Of the state's five largest systems, it alone fails to automatically segregate such inmates.
Orange County jails are the only ones among the state's five largest jail systems that do not automatically provide protective custody to inmates accused of sex crimes involving children, leaving them vulnerable to attacks like the one last month in which a prisoner was beaten to death.
A second inmate, awaiting trial on charges of child molestation, was severely beaten in June and has just recently been released -- brain-damaged, according to his family -- after five months in a hospital.
The Sheriff's Department's decision to pull back protection for child molestation and child pornography possession suspects -- perhaps those most despised by other prisoners -- occurred sometime in the last three years, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the situation.
