The light is a sickening green. It washes over the stainless steel tables and toilets, the smooth concrete, the flaking paint, the steel bars and expressionless faces of the inmates. Their faces give away nothing, but their eyes are agonized. Their subtle movements—the tapping feet, the bobbing knees, the clenching and unclenching hands, say it’s too goddamn crowded in here—but their faces reveal nothing. Only the eyes betray the anger boiling up inside them.

Many correctional facilities in California have court consent decrees to prevent them from exceeding rated capacities. Not the Monterey County jail. In its current state, the county jail is designed to house 813 inmates. Right now it houses 1,132 inmates. The population is 66.9 percent Hispanic, 20.5 percent Caucasian, 10.5 percent African-American, and 2.1 percent “Other”—mostly Asian. Those numbers stay quite constant.

Females make up 13 percent of the population. They are housed in a separate wing designed for 97 inmates. It currently holds 139.

Gone are the days when the county jail housed low-risk inmates in for minor crimes. Forty to 50 percent of the Monterey County jail’s inmates are gang-affiliated. Twenty three are murder suspects and 30 are attempted murder suspects.

“The kind of inmates we house are far, far more violent than we ever had before,” says Chief Deputy Burt Liebersbach, the wise, implacable man who’s spent nearly all of his 30-year career working for the Monterey County Sheriff’s Corrections division. “That coincides with the escalating violence out on the street.”

When a person gets arrested, the county jail traditionally houses them while they wait to be tried and convicted. If they get a sentence of more than one year they go to prison. Not so long ago, a vast majority of inmates in the county jail were in for minor crimes. Today that trend has been reversed. According to Liebersbach, 65 percent of the county jail’s inmates will go to prison when tried and convicted. To complicate matters, the judicial process has slowed to a crawl. Some of the inmates waiting to be sentenced to long prison terms have been in the county jail for three years.

The overcrowding and the increasingly violent nature of the inmates has created a “very, very hostile work environment” for Liebersbach and his deputies.

To make matters worse, the jail was designed with little practical knowledge and almost no foresight. It’s made up of 27 separate housing units, each tacked to the next in partially-funded bursts of administrative desperation over the last 36 years. As a result, the whole place has a jury-rigged feel, like it’s run on a shoestring. For a brief, scary moment it feels like the only thing keeping the inmates from taking the place over is the implacable confidence of their keepers.

“It’s the Winchester Mystery House of jail construction,” Liebersbach tells me as we wander through its convoluted and disorienting chambers. “We just keep adding on.”