Under Cover of Authority: Terror & Death at NCCF Super Max

Under Cover of Authority provides a chilling eye-witness account of Men's County Jail, downtown Los Angeles, and the Peter Pitches Honor Ranch between October 1995 and November 1996. It focuses on events which occurred within the "eye-shot" of a single inmate, recorded in code in a daily log, and phoned to an answering machine outside the jail for later transcription. Welcome to the world of inmates: one of incessant verbal degradation, beatings, extreme punishments for trivial offenses, and engineered riots captured in numbing detail. Here U.S. citizens - irrespective of the magnitude of their crime, or even their innocence or guilt, as yet unproved in a court of law - are routinely endangered, degraded and brutalized, primarily by those who have been given the authority to guard them. This exposure of the first circle of the American Gulag should spark an inquiry into the Los Angeles County Jail System.