The Brief

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved a plan Tuesday that will allow people in jail to make phone calls free of charge starting Dec. 1. The approval is a major victory for criminal justice reform advocates who say forcing incarcerated people to make collect calls is an unfair burden.

“More than 80% of the people in our jails are from under-resourced communities of color,” Supervisor Hilda Solis said in a statement. “Asking that families take on the burden of costly phone calls is unfair and inequitable.”

Under the county’s plan, Public Communications Services Inc. will provide telephone service at a cost to the county of $32 million over a 29-month period starting Dec.1. The cost-per-minute would range from 39 to 42 cents per minute.

Free phone calls will also be available in juvenile halls and camps run by the Probation Department.

Current calls charge 'exorbitant fees'

The jail population in L.A. County is more than 14,000. The size of the contract illustrates how much friends and family have been paying to talk to incarcerated people, said Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.

“The county has basically preyed on the families of incarcerated people” by passing on “exorbitant fees” from contractors, said Lewis, who noted the costs are far higher than the cost of a cell phone call. He said a 15-minute call can cost $3.

He also said it's in the interest of community safety to make it easy for people in jail to call outside.

“It's vitally important to keep a person connected to their family. That’s part of the rehabilitation process,” Lewis said. “Psychologically, it damages hope” when someone is unable to talk to people who support them.

Two years ago, the board initially voted to study the idea of making phone calls free. In July, it voted to do so, asking Sheriff Robert Luna to develop a plan.

The move followed the filing of a lawsuit against L.A. County that called the cost of phone calls “extortionate and outrageous.” The April legal action by inmate advocates accused the county, through its contractors, of marking up the cost of both phone calls and jail commissary items like food and hygiene products so much that it amounted to an illegal tax.

The lawsuit seeks to force L.A. to repay inmates and their families for nearly two years of inflated charges.

Free calls would end a years-long effort

“The charges at issue work a terrible hardship, and unlawfully put the burden on inmates’ families, friends and associates of paying for County services and costs that are rightfully the responsibility of the taxpayers and society at large,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit quotes a 2014 remark by then-Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky as an example of how long the board has known about “the injustices they are inflicting.”

“Everyone’s making a lot of money at the expense of inmates’ families,” Yaroslavsky said. “They’re in jail. They’re paying their debt to society. That doesn’t give us the right to fleece them.”

L.A. County has no plan to address commissary costs at this time.

L.A. will become the largest local jail system in the country to provide free phone calls for incarcerated people. A state law that made phone calls free in state prisons went into effect on Jan. 1, but that law doesn’t apply to county jails. San Francisco also does not charge people in its local jails for phone calls.

One of the challenges supervisors face is how to replace the fees they will lose when the phone calls become free. The roughly $30 million per year raised from phone calls is used to pay for jail maintenance and education programs.

In July, the supervisors directed county staff to look at drawing down the $48 million in revenue from the phone calls that’s piled up in recent years.

Supervisors say money from the phone calls has been misspent — and they don’t have clear tracking on where it ended up. A 2021 county audit found the Sheriff’s Department may have been illegally spending almost half of the jail phone fees on jail maintenance, despite state law restricting its use for maintenance and requiring that the money mainly be used for the education and well-being of people incarcerated.

An East Hollywood nursing home that nearly lost its license this year because of repeated state citations for deaths of residents at the facility was cited again last month after another person died.

The California Department of Public Health cited Brier Oak on Sunset after a 92-year-old resident bled to death on Sept. 27. Staff members had continued injecting her with blood thinners over a 40-hour period in violation of clinical guidelines.

It’s an AA citation, the most severe the department issues when violations of care standards are determined to be a substantial factor in someone’s death. The facility faces a $120,000 fine.

These kinds of citations are rare. The department has recently issued, on average, fewer than 20 AA citations yearly across more than 1,200 skilled nursing facilities in California.

Brier Oak has received three AA citations for patient deaths since late 2022.

State regulations require authorities to suspend or revoke the licenses of any facilities that get two AA citations within a period of 24 months.

The state Public Health Department began that process with Brier Oak in May based on resident deaths in 2022 and 2024. But officials dropped that effort later because they say they determined the two patient deaths had occurred 26 months apart — just outside of the two-year window.

The facility’s administrators did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Advocates for nursing home residents say the recent death could have been avoided if the state had taken action.

“There were red flags, and a lot of these red flags existed prior to the death of this poor resident,” said Tony Chicotel, senior staff attorney with  California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

The state said Brier Oak has until Dec. 19 to notify the department whether it intends to appeal the state citation.

What led to the patient deaths?

In the recent death at Brier Oak cited by the state, multiple communication and technical failures by nursing staff led to the patient bleeding out over a period of 40 hours, according to the citation.

The 92-year-old patient was immobile and had been prescribed a blood thinner called heparin to help prevent blood clots from forming. But once a patient is bleeding, those injections make bleeding worse, and potentially fatal.

When nursing staff found bright red blood in the resident’s diaper the day before she died, Brier Oak failed to follow established processes for documenting the bleeding or communicating it to a nurse practitioner or medical doctor, according to the citation.

Nurses told state authorities they delayed informing physicians because they “get mad” when contacted in the middle of the night.

The facility’s staff also failed to fully assess the patient to determine the possible causes of the bleeding and or to properly monitor the issue during crucial periods, according to the citation.

She suffered four internal bleeding episodes over 40 hours and continued to receive blood thinner injections.

The citation says a nurse practitioner at Brier Oak told state licensing authorities later that if she’d been informed about the patient’s ongoing bleeding, she would have stopped the blood thinner and sent her to a hospital.

In 2022, Brier Oak received a AA citation after a 62-year-old woman died from respiratory failure in part because nurses hadn’t been trained to operate her breathing machine.

In 2024, the nursing home got another AA citation. This time, a 63-year-old woman with paraplegia and severe obesity fell from her bed and died while a nursing assistant was changing her. The assistant was alone, even though the woman’s care plan required two staff members.

Who owns Brier Oak?

Brier Oak on Sunset is primarily owned by Genesis Healthcare, a publicly-traded nursing home operator that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July.

Once the largest nursing home operator in the U.S., Genesis was facing billions in debt when it declared bankruptcy, according to court filings. That includes millions in potential damages from lawsuits related to patient care failures.

The company did not respond to LAist’s request for comment on the recent citation at Brier Oak.

The citation should trigger a suspension or revocation of the facility's license, according to state regulations. The latter means it would have to close its doors. The two most recent deaths and citations at the facility occurred within the two-year window.

The California Department of Public Health confirmed it cited Brier Oak on Nov. 26.

The department said the facility submitted a required written response before a Dec. 6 deadline, showing how it will fix the problems and prevent them from happening again..

The department determined Brier Oak was back in compliance during an onsite visit last week, a representative told LAist.

Brier Oak on Sunset currently houses about 150 patients, according to state records.

A bankruptcy judge has stalled the proposed sale of Genesis Healthcare to an affiliate of one of its investors.

Experts say it’s unclear whether the state would revoke the license of an owner who is actively trying to sell and turn over operations to someone else.

It’s been a rough start to ski and snowboard season for California mountain towns. Snowfall is well below average, but Christmas could come with some of the white stuff. Here's where things stand:

Hmmm. Didn’t we just have a record storm?

Yes. That big atmospheric river that hit Southern California last month made it one of the wettest Novembers on records. But since then, it’s been unusually warm and dry, which is not good for mountain towns that depend on snow, and the outdoor enthusiasts that flock to them.

How bad is it?

California’s snowpack is about 20% of normal for this time of the year, according to the state’s snow-tracking website. Southern California isn’t quite as bad off — we’ve gotten about half our normal snowfall so far.

As for the resorts, only about 20% of the terrain at Bear Mountain in Big Bear is open. About 35% of Mammoth Mountain is open.

Can’t they just make snow?

They are, but the unusually warm temperatures have curbed resorts’ ability to make enough snow to open more terrain. “If you're blowing water into 40-degrees, it's going to stay water,” said Justin Kanton, a spokesperson for Big Bear Mountain Resort. “ So as much as people probably would want us to just crank the snow guns all day, every day up here and just get things moving, that's not really possible.”

But there’s a silver lining!

The dry weather has allowed Caltrans to make good progress toward opening Highway 38, said Evan Engle, who chairs the board of the Big Bear Chamber of Commerce. The road typically handles up to 40% of traffic up to the mountain town, Engle said. But it’s been closed since September when it got washed out by Tropical Storm Mario.

Getting it open as soon as possible is key to keeping visitor traffic manageable, and getting supplies to Big Bear.

What’s the snow outlook?

SoCal mountains are likely to see some precipitation around Christmas, said Kyle Wheeler, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. But with temperatures not expected to drop much, it’s uncertain how much of it will be white, Wheeler said.

If you go to Big Bear: 

• If you plan to hit the slopes, get on it early, when the snow is at its best given the warm conditions. 
• No snow? There’s more to do than ski and snowboard. Check this list of winter fun events.  
• Worried about traffic? Consider going up earlier in the week. If you can’t do that, consider taking Highway 18 through Lucerne Valley. It’s a longer route if you’re coming from L.A., but less traveled, and less likely to make you car sick (fewer tight curves). 

Hop onto TikTok and you'll find lots of videos of young people — mostly women — fake baking under the glowing UV lights of a tanning bed. Seattle dermatologist Heather Rogers says this is an alarming trend that comes after years of decline in indoor tanning in the U.S.

She points to a 2025 survey from the American Academy of Dermatology which found 20% of Gen Z respondents prioritize getting a tan over protecting their skin. And 25% say it's worth looking great now even if it means looking worse later.

They feel like "it's better to be tan than it is to worry about skin cancer," Rogers says.

A new study in the journal Science Advances reinforces just why they should worry.

Researchers found that tanning bed users were nearly three times as likely to develop melanoma — the deadliest form of skin cancer — compared to people who'd never tanned indoors. They also had DNA damage that can lead to melanoma across nearly the entire surface of the skin.

"Even in skin cells that look normal, in tanning bed patients, you can find those precursor mutations" that lead to melanoma, says Dr. Pedram Gerami, one of the study's authors and the IDP Foundation professor of skin cancer research at Northwestern University.

Gerami and his collaborators compared the medical records of nearly 3,000 patients who used tanning beds to an age-matched control group of patients who didn't tan indoors. They found that the more people used the tanning beds, the higher their risk of melanoma.

"If they had 10 to 50 tanning bed exposures, their risk was twice as high as the control group," Gerami says. If they had over 200 tanning bed visits, their risk was more than eight times as high.

"If you think about it, getting 200 tanning bed exposures can happen really quickly. If you go once a week for four years, there you are," he says.

The researchers also performed genetic sequencing on normal skin cells from tanning bed users. Most were younger women, which makes sense, because studies have shown that young women in their teens and 20s are the heaviest users of indoor tanning, says study co-author Hunter Shain, an associate professor of dermatology at the UC San Francisco.

Shain says when the researchers compared these skin samples to normal skin cells from people in the general population who were twice the age of the indoor tanners, they were "stunned" by what they found.

"Women in their 30s and 40s had more mutations than people in their 70s and 80s from the general population," says Shain, whose research focuses on the biology of skin cancer. "They somehow were able to cram in two lifetimes' worth of UV damage in 30 years."

Dr. Heather Rogers, who was not involved in the study, notes that tanning beds can emit ultraviolet radiation that is 10 to 15 times stronger than what you'd get from the sun. She says that tanning beds are often marketed as being safer than the sun, but this study shows how wrong those claims are.

Dr. Pedram Gerami says many of the patients he sees at a high-risk melanoma clinic are women who started indoor tanning as teens wanting to look better for events like homecoming and prom.

"Now, as young adults, they're having to deal with frequent skin checks, frequent doctor visits, frequent biopsies, lots of anxiety, and the emotional burden of having been diagnosed with cancer at a young age," Garami says. "So they have a lot of heaviness to deal with."

He says some of these patients chose to donate skin samples to the study in hopes of helping other young people avoid the same fate.

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