PITCHESS VIOLENCE ON DECLINE; RECENT BRAWL DEFIES TREND; UPRISINGS DWINDLE IN NUMBER OVER RECENT YEARS.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

Eight inmates spent Tuesday nursing wounds suffered in the latest brawl at the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center, but jail officials said the violence at the county's four-jail complex actually has subsided in recent years.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials, who run Pitchess and other county jails, said fighting among inmates was an almost daily occurrence in 1996, while from January through September of this year there have been 50 disturbances reported at the Saugus facility.

In those uprisings, 2,693 inmates were involved and 367 hurt, according to department statistics.

Those figures show a marked improvement in the atmosphere at the jail since 1996.

``We had ongoing riots, almost on a daily basis,'' said Lt. Art Valenzuela, in charge of operations at the North County Correctional Facility, a maximum-security jail at Pitchess.

``I think it was a situation where the Mexican Mafia . . . orchestrated the defiance, the fighting,'' he said. ``There was a lot of racial fighting going on, but it has scaled down immensely since that time.''

Through tipsters and other intelligence-gathering means, authorities have been able to get advance word of brewing inmate tensions and separate out the instigators - ``shot callers'' in jail parlance - before they give the orders to fight, Valenzuela said.

``We have informants who tell us about the people who may be calling for a hit,'' he said.

Sheriff's officials divide the inmate disturbances into four categories: minor, major, riot and ``significant inmate incident,'' the latter the most serious. During 1997, there were 93 inmate disturbances at Pitchess.

Valenzuela said such episodes are almost an automatic dynamic of incarceration, given the personalities of criminal offenders, the close quarters of jail dormitory life, racial tensions that build up and the turf wars that ensue.

``It won't go away. You're always going to have petty little things that people fight over in a jail environment,'' Valenzuela said. ``This happens in a jail environment. You have people who are violent, vicious individuals and it's a kind of an eye-for-an-eye situation.

``They fight for the most petty reasons: This is the Hispanic table, or This is the black telephone,'' Valenzuela said.

On Monday, about 30 Latino and African-American inmates at the jail fought in a jail exercise yard crowded with about 200 men, Valenzuela said.

Eight inmates were hurt in the scuffle, suffering injuries ranging from stab wounds to minor cuts and scrapes. A deputy fired a stingball grenade that broke up the melee.