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Why 4,998 died in U.S. jails before their day in court

125 points by chmaynard 6y ago

chrisseaton 6y ago
Remand is a crazy idea. Why do we detain people before they're proven guilty?
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Governments like that interest free cash.
- rhino369 6y ago
  For serious crimes, because criminals would flee. For non-serious crimes we really shouldn't. But "cashless bail" has downsides. People are more likely to just skip hearings. Or they keep committing minor crimes because they don't view themselves as facing consequences.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Skipping a hearing causes an arrest. It's not that you no longer have to show up, it's merely we'll take your word that you will (or we'll arrest you again) without requiring money up front.
    - zepto 6y ago
      You can’t so easily arrest someone who has taken flight, since you don’t know where they are. Police generally don’t have a lot of resources to track people down.
      - freeone3000 6y ago
        blink That's... that's half their job. The vast majority of people who don't show up to court cases aren't criminal masterminds who have the resources to fly around the world, they're usually staying at their brother's or their cousin's. Or their own house. And you'd have to track the people down, deposit or not. The deposit doesn't change whether they show up.
        zepto 6y ago
        What deposit are you talking about? And.. staying with your cousin isn’t “taking flight” - it’s just being a fool. It doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to evade the police. They don’t keep searching indefinitely.
        freeone3000 6y ago
        The deposit you leave at the courthouse that you get back when you attend trial.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        What you're talking about is called a 'bail bond'.
        zepto 6y ago
        Understood. I wasn’t talking about bail bonds. I was talking about remand.
        freeone3000 6y ago
        Systems without cash bail still have remand. It's reasonable to deem someone to dangerous or flighty to release. It's cruel to demand a legalized bribe for release.
        zepto 6y ago
        Fair point. I agree - this creates a 2 tier justice system.
  - DenisM 6y ago
    > they keep committing minor crimes because they don't view themselves as facing consequences A speedy trial might help with that. And it's a great idea in any event.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > For serious crimes, because criminals would flee. That's a good reason for not going simple OR (own recognizance), and may in cases where there is more personal information beyond just a serious crime be part of why particular suspects ought not be considered for bail of any kind, but not a good reason, in any case, for a jail or cash-bail binary choice. > But "cashless bail" has downsides. People are more likely to just skip hearings. D.C. uses a no-cash-bail system, and IIRC does not see this compared to either when they used cash bail or to other jurisdictions that do. > Or they keep committing minor crimes because they don't view themselves as facing consequences. Again, I don't think there's evidence that this is the case, but insofar as it is, it seems it would be a speedy trial problem. (And/or a reason certain suspects ought not to be eligible for bail of any kind.)
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > For serious crimes, because criminals would flee. Well if you weren't detaining them... 'fleeing' wouldn't be a thing so they couldn't flee and problem solved. As long as they turn up for their trial what's the problem? If they don't, prosecute them for that as well.
- loeg 6y ago
  Theoretically, two reasons: flight risk, and if you think the person is probably guilty, risk of re-offence. IMO flight risk isn't a real concern most of the time, and the modern surveillance state makes flight much more difficult than in ye olden days. I'm not keen on keeping suspects locked up on risk of re-offence, either; it seems a total violation of presumption of innocence.
  - juniper_strong 6y ago
    >> I'm not keen on keeping suspects locked up on risk of re-offence, either; it seems a total violation of presumption of innocence So if you were making the laws, the trooper that pulled over Timothy McVeigh would have just given him a summons and told him to show up in court?
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    When you say that flight risk isn't a real concern, something like 25% of people on bail fail to appear. Ultimately it often falls to bounty hunters to go find them. I agree that holding someone without a conviction looks like a violation of the presumption of innocence. This is why the right to a speedy trial is in the constitution, to minimize this violation. Unfortunately that right is somewhat theoretical. Depending on the crime, people spend on average between 50 and 200 days in jail before trial. This is way too long and we should really figure out how to streamline these processes for the cases where someone really does need to be held for trial.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > When you say that flight risk isn't a real concern, something like 25% of people on bail fail to appear. Well, it's certainly not a real concern that is addressed by cash bail; if someone is inclined to flee prosecution for a major crime, a cash bail will either (a) be unaffordable, and thus equivalent to no bail, or (b) affordable and an acceptable cost to sacrifice when fleeing. If you think about what people are fleeing if they are fleeing bail, it makes sense. Bail is essentially taking money. If someone can post a million dollars bail, but thinks they can evade the Justice system by fleeing, a million dollars probably isn't going to be worth a sizable risk of being imprisoned for whatever the potential sentence is for their crime. OTOH, non-cash-bail systems tend to put more focus on monitoring and related conditions which have a real and meaningful impact on flight.
- s5300 6y ago
  You ever hear that thing where we don't hire people if they may be in debt for jobs that are said to matter or be a risk? Well, we have this thing called civil forfeiture... It lets you take somebody's money if you're a cop. So let's say you're a cop in need of some money. You can simply pull somebody over, among others things... and... take their money Well, what would you do if somebody just took your money? You might want to tell on them, or at least get your money back. Easiest way to not get told on with consequence if you stole somebody's money? Put them in jail with the powers vested in you...
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Why do we detain people before they're proven guilty? There are a lot of reasons to do this. The real question is why the detention is designed to be punitive, and why can you pay to get out of it?
  - russh 6y ago
    To soften up those people up for the plea bargain phase of the american legal adventure.
typon 6y ago
This is heartbreaking to read. I don't know how people who's communities are going through this pain deal with it. I can barely read this article without getting emotional.
- futurehero 6y ago
  A community is a collection of individuals, each of whom may or may not feel pain in response to something that happens to less than 0.002% of Americans, and generally as a result of the deceased individual's own behavior. Collections of individuals do not experience pain as a collective. Many, if made aware, would still not care, because they manage to keep themselves out of jail, and barring that, manage to refrain from assaulting the correctional officers charged with maintaining order within the correctional system. Call them callous, but theirs is a way of being in the world that is no less valid than one that holds every individual's life worthy of special protection from the consequences of their unforced errors, and where these might be attributable to mental illness, there is a rational argument for putting the space and resources consumed by the mentally ill to better use. One wouldn't fill a spaceship full of mentally ill occupants where every individual's actions contribute to or harm the survival of the others, and it is not a huge leap to see the earth as a ship and the survival of it's occupants as far from guaranteed. It is straight forward to infer that that which increases net prosocial behavior within the species need not be resisted.
  - notherthrowaway 6y ago
    Took the red one?
  - bitdizzy 6y ago
    > Call them callous, but theirs is a way of being in the world that is no less valid than one that holds every individual's life worthy of special protection from the consequences of their unforced errors, and where these might be attributable to mental illness, there is a rational argument for putting the space and resources consumed by the mentally ill to better use. You've asserted that this eugenicist viewpoint is valid and is defensible but you don't present such a defense. Would you like to post a defense this position which is by no means obvious?
ry454 6y ago
This reminds me of what the Lincoln character said in the same named movie about the 13th amendment: "what you will be to our nation after this I don't know." Well, now we know.
dmix 6y ago
Defund police? If you must make them worse. How about redirecting it into the prison system instead of some fairy social justice grift?
- kennywinker 6y ago
  Just like over funding the police leads to over-policing, more funding for prisons would probably lead to more unnecessary incarceration, not better conditions. Incarceration is just fundamentally antithetical to rehabilitation. To quote Danielle Sered in this excellent On The Media interview on restorative justice: > The core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet one's economic needs. The four core features of prison are shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one's economic needs. (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-restorative-justice https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...)
ArnoVW 6y ago
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Fyodor Dostoevsky
- pessimizer 6y ago
  It's so obvious, and an absolutely accurate way to judge the quality of a jurisdiction. People in prison are the weakest people in society, weaker than children (who usually have the ability to walk away from home whenever they want, although they're subject to being searched for and returned.) As the weakest, nominally least deserving people, benefits given to the prison population filter through the culture. You can't give good health care to prisoners while people who haven't committed crimes (including the victims of those prisoners) go without. You can't give adequate housing to prisoners without giving it to everyone. You can't give free education to prisoners without giving it to everyone. You can't give prisoners freedom of speech without giving it to everyone. You can't give prisoners the vote (and convenient physical access to it) without giving it to everyone. Start with prisoners, and you elevate everything. Instead, in the US we racistly fantasize about interracial sexual assaults, make people shit in front of each other, and make them work for 15 cents an hour. It's obvious what society has to look like outside of the walls. And were not talking about prison here; this is jail. Everybody there is innocent. The state should keep them comfortable, and spend as much effort trying to come up with reasons why they are not guilty as reasons they are guilty. Instead, it's just pre-prison.
- futurehero 6y ago
  There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. 5000, or 0.2% of them, died in jail. A 99.8% chance of not dying in jail for those 2.3 million people is thus indicative of a society with high degree of civilization. Fyodor would call our jails health spas compared to what existed in Russia during his lifetime between 1821 and 1881.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > 5000, or 0.2% of them, died in jail. No, 5000 of them died in pre-trial detention. A lot more died in jail (which is a much larger set that includes most pretrial detention and a lot of other incarceration), and an even larger number died while incarcerated (an even larger set that is a superset of both of the previous ones.)
cm2187 6y ago
The article is pretty bad. It starts as an anecdote about an inmate beaten to death by the wards, like if it was representative, but then the overwhelming majority of deaths are a result of diseases, overdoses and suicides. Also no reference to the denominator, so you can’t really tell if there is an over mortality in jail vs outside (particularly for the subset of the population that is likely to end up in jail - drug addicts, people with mental problems, etc).
- komali2 6y ago
  Isn't the denominator a number that happens to also the vast majority of the world's imprisoned? Nothing you're saying makes me think any of this is ok lol.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Well, that’s the point. The larger the population in jail, the more likely you will have deaths in jails. It doesn’t means the death is caused by the imprisonment. Particularly for a high risk population.
  - alexchamberlain 6y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with your point in anyway, but just a point of reference: the article is talking about American jails, as opposed to American prisons. If I understand it correctly, once convicted, most people would be sent to a prison. I don't think such a distinction is made elsewhere (at least not in the UK).
    - futurehero 6y ago
      For reference, post-conviction, those sentenced to a year or less remain in jails, while those sentenced to a year and a day or more go to prisons. Prison is actually preferable over jail for most incarcerated individuals, as jails tend to be more tightly controlled than prisons, which function like their own societies with built-in, tractable hierarchies. People in prisons behave, in a sense, because they have to live together.
- 6y ago
komali2 6y ago
> The U.S. government collects detailed data on who’s dying in which jails around the country – but won’t let anyone see it. I want to know more about this. That's my data, as I am that for which the government exists. So who dares to withhold it from me? Have newspapers tried FOIA requests for it? This is the first I've heard of this data being withheld. Withheld by who? Edit: wow holy shit it's worse than I thought: > The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has collected inmate mortality data for two decades – but statistics for individual jails are withheld from the public, government officials and oversight agencies under a 1984 law limiting the release of BJS data. Agency officials say that discretion is critical because it encourages sheriffs and police to report their deaths data each year. They don't want to let people read the reports because they're afraid cops won't report their murders otherwise. Despicable. Now I have more reasons than ever to continue protesting.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  As you've noted, non-compliance with Federal oversight is part of the game. They intentionally don't want numbers to reflect poorly on the penal institutions of the US.
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  They don't release the data because if they did, then the gov fears the jail would then start mis-reporting their data or obfuscating the actual data. By doing so, they kind of give a pass to the jails in order to get them to report more accurate numbers. But don't worry, Reuters did their own data analysis: Because the government won’t release jail-by-jail death data, Reuters compiled its own. The news organization tracked jail deaths over the dozen years from 2008 to 2019 to create the largest such database outside of the Justice Department. Reporters filed more than 1,500 records requests to obtain information about deaths in 523 U.S. jails – every jail with an average population of 750 or more inmates, and the 10 largest jails or jail systems in nearly every state. Together, those jails hold an average of some 450,000 inmates a day, or about three out of every five nationwide. The results were predictable: Reuters is making the full data it gathered available to the public. One finding: Since the last Justice Department report, for 2016, the death rate in big jails has continued to climb, leaving it up 8% in 2019, the highest point in the 12-year period of 2008-2019 examined by Reuters. In that time, the suicide rate declined as many facilities launched suicide awareness and response initiatives. But the death rate from drug and alcohol overdoses rose about 72% amid the opioid epidemic. So alcohol and opioid OD's accounted for most of the deaths. Not mishandling by the staff or as the first story in the article highlighted, an inmate who was beat to death by the prison guards. Which begs the question, how are drug addicts ODing while they are being incarcerated? Don't they have resources to get these people help with their withdrawal and treatment??
aaomidi 6y ago
This is absolutely fucking bonkers. Why are we literally fine with this? When are we going to draw the line? Is this the bystander effect in the scale of an entire country? "Oh I'm waiting for someone else to start taking action first" And then some people have the audacity to criticize people taking direct action while they're living in their single family homes, completely oblivious to what's happening to thousands of their country-people. I'm disappointed in us.
- komali2 6y ago
  We are protesting. We're forcing politicians to put themselves on one side or the other of a line by asking them whether they believe Black lives matter. If you aren't seeing protests, I invite you to simply start one one your own. If your politicians aren't reacting, visit a local one with your cell phone camera on and ask them if Black lives matter. I've been twisting the screws like this on some local shithead conservative politicians and it's honestly kinda fun to watch them squirm.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    I am seeing them and I'm pretty active in the Seattle ones. I'm just disappointed that so many people aren't active in them. What % of Americans do you think know there is nearly daily protests happening in nearly every metro area? 10%? 20%?
    - coffeemaniac 6y ago
      I feel like a lot of the people I'm around every day know, but since most of my socialization is in a work context we don't talk about it much. Maybe others are similar. Thank you for being out there. Politicians need to hear from people on the streets.
- s5300 6y ago
  But they're bad people. Didn't you hear? Weren't you told?
- huge87 6y ago
devindotcom 6y ago
Good on Reuters for investigating and sharing this data. The jail system is a wreck and people with mental health issues do not have good outcomes in it. I worked with these folks on the mental health side years ago and we avoided putting our people in King County Jail whenever at all possible for a lot of reasons. Support in the form of mental health professionals, other social workers, and basic training for the cops and corrections officers is severely lacking. Some of my guys would be in and out of KCJ dozens of times for minor charges, which would interrupt what little treatment and stability they had, sometimes catastrophically. Between that and the ER visits they were probably costing the city and state tens of thousands a year. Considering how cheap housing was when we could find it and the incredibly powerful effect it had on their lives and outcomes, it felt like the system was robbing itself while making everyone worse off in the process. And Seattle is known for being a compassionate, responsive city for this stuff! How it must be in other places I can't even imagine.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >, it felt like the system was robbing itself while making everyone worse off in the process. More like robbing the taxpayers to pay you (assuming your agency was state funded), the guards, the food supplier, etc. etc. Thousands of livelihoods are supported by crappy prisons and the war on drugs.
  - jjones2 6y ago
    The only thing we should be "at war with" is this pathetic excuse for a fucking government. The jail system couldn't even keep the worlds number one criminal from being brutally murdered, with the guards sleeping and the tapes "not working" (Epstein)
    - komali2 6y ago
      Agreed probably but I would consider el chapo to be the world's number one incarcerated criminal.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lolbrels 6y ago
>TURNAROUND, TRAGEDY: Harvey Hill’s life was on track, his family said, before his trespassing arrest. REUTERS/Hill family handout Makes his criminal activity sound like an inconvenience to himself. Simplest way to avoid dying in jail is to not be a criminal because the reality is you will not be treated like a human being. But that should be implied because society has deemed your life better spent locked away in a cage out of sight out of mind. Source I found states ~2.3million currently incarcerated, 700,000 of those for violent crimes. .2% mortality rate actually quite impressive to me considering the circumstances and I would guess of those 5000 the one the article references is an outlier considering the events leading to the death seem a bit suspicious - enough to write a story I guess.
lalaland1125 6y ago
If you are interested in helping fix this problem, I would highly recommend looking into local initiatives to eliminate cash bail; they can significantly reduce the pre-trial prison population. https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/new-jersey-set-out-to-reform-its-cash-bail-system-now-the-results-are-in/ https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/new-jersey-set-out-to... indicates that these cash bail elimination policies significantly reduce the number of people in jail pre-trial. If you are in California, we have a unique opportunity to eliminate cash bail this year by voting yes on Prop 25. I would highly recommend voting yes on Prop 25. Note that you can register to vote all the way up till November 3rd (we have same day registration here in California so you can register while voting).
- mkolodny 6y ago
  Prop 25 is definitely an improvement. It forces jails to release people who were accused of most misdemeanors within 12 hours. I think more still needs to be done. Both police officers in the streets and officers guarding jails should be held accountable for their actions. Police brutality anywhere should be prosecuted.

125 points by chmaynard 6y ago

chrisseaton 6y ago

Remand is a crazy idea. Why do we detain people before they're proven guilty?

aaomidi 6y ago
Governments like that interest free cash.
rhino369 6y ago
For serious crimes, because criminals would flee. For non-serious crimes we really shouldn't. But "cashless bail" has downsides. People are more likely to just skip hearings. Or they keep committing minor crimes because they don't view themselves as facing consequences.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Skipping a hearing causes an arrest. It's not that you no longer have to show up, it's merely we'll take your word that you will (or we'll arrest you again) without requiring money up front.
  - zepto 6y ago
    You can’t so easily arrest someone who has taken flight, since you don’t know where they are. Police generally don’t have a lot of resources to track people down.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      blink That's... that's half their job. The vast majority of people who don't show up to court cases aren't criminal masterminds who have the resources to fly around the world, they're usually staying at their brother's or their cousin's. Or their own house. And you'd have to track the people down, deposit or not. The deposit doesn't change whether they show up.
      - zepto 6y ago
        What deposit are you talking about? And.. staying with your cousin isn’t “taking flight” - it’s just being a fool. It doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to evade the police. They don’t keep searching indefinitely.
        freeone3000 6y ago
        The deposit you leave at the courthouse that you get back when you attend trial.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        What you're talking about is called a 'bail bond'.
        zepto 6y ago
        Understood. I wasn’t talking about bail bonds. I was talking about remand.
        freeone3000 6y ago
        Systems without cash bail still have remand. It's reasonable to deem someone to dangerous or flighty to release. It's cruel to demand a legalized bribe for release.
        zepto 6y ago
        Fair point. I agree - this creates a 2 tier justice system.
- DenisM 6y ago
  > they keep committing minor crimes because they don't view themselves as facing consequences A speedy trial might help with that. And it's a great idea in any event.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > For serious crimes, because criminals would flee. That's a good reason for not going simple OR (own recognizance), and may in cases where there is more personal information beyond just a serious crime be part of why particular suspects ought not be considered for bail of any kind, but not a good reason, in any case, for a jail or cash-bail binary choice. > But "cashless bail" has downsides. People are more likely to just skip hearings. D.C. uses a no-cash-bail system, and IIRC does not see this compared to either when they used cash bail or to other jurisdictions that do. > Or they keep committing minor crimes because they don't view themselves as facing consequences. Again, I don't think there's evidence that this is the case, but insofar as it is, it seems it would be a speedy trial problem. (And/or a reason certain suspects ought not to be eligible for bail of any kind.)
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > For serious crimes, because criminals would flee. Well if you weren't detaining them... 'fleeing' wouldn't be a thing so they couldn't flee and problem solved. As long as they turn up for their trial what's the problem? If they don't, prosecute them for that as well.
loeg 6y ago
Theoretically, two reasons: flight risk, and if you think the person is probably guilty, risk of re-offence. IMO flight risk isn't a real concern most of the time, and the modern surveillance state makes flight much more difficult than in ye olden days. I'm not keen on keeping suspects locked up on risk of re-offence, either; it seems a total violation of presumption of innocence.
- juniper_strong 6y ago
  >> I'm not keen on keeping suspects locked up on risk of re-offence, either; it seems a total violation of presumption of innocence So if you were making the laws, the trooper that pulled over Timothy McVeigh would have just given him a summons and told him to show up in court?
- cameldrv 6y ago
  When you say that flight risk isn't a real concern, something like 25% of people on bail fail to appear. Ultimately it often falls to bounty hunters to go find them. I agree that holding someone without a conviction looks like a violation of the presumption of innocence. This is why the right to a speedy trial is in the constitution, to minimize this violation. Unfortunately that right is somewhat theoretical. Depending on the crime, people spend on average between 50 and 200 days in jail before trial. This is way too long and we should really figure out how to streamline these processes for the cases where someone really does need to be held for trial.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > When you say that flight risk isn't a real concern, something like 25% of people on bail fail to appear. Well, it's certainly not a real concern that is addressed by cash bail; if someone is inclined to flee prosecution for a major crime, a cash bail will either (a) be unaffordable, and thus equivalent to no bail, or (b) affordable and an acceptable cost to sacrifice when fleeing. If you think about what people are fleeing if they are fleeing bail, it makes sense. Bail is essentially taking money. If someone can post a million dollars bail, but thinks they can evade the Justice system by fleeing, a million dollars probably isn't going to be worth a sizable risk of being imprisoned for whatever the potential sentence is for their crime. OTOH, non-cash-bail systems tend to put more focus on monitoring and related conditions which have a real and meaningful impact on flight.
s5300 6y ago
You ever hear that thing where we don't hire people if they may be in debt for jobs that are said to matter or be a risk? Well, we have this thing called civil forfeiture... It lets you take somebody's money if you're a cop. So let's say you're a cop in need of some money. You can simply pull somebody over, among others things... and... take their money Well, what would you do if somebody just took your money? You might want to tell on them, or at least get your money back. Easiest way to not get told on with consequence if you stole somebody's money? Put them in jail with the powers vested in you...
pessimizer 6y ago
> Why do we detain people before they're proven guilty? There are a lot of reasons to do this. The real question is why the detention is designed to be punitive, and why can you pay to get out of it?
- russh 6y ago
  To soften up those people up for the plea bargain phase of the american legal adventure.

typon 6y ago

This is heartbreaking to read. I don't know how people who's communities are going through this pain deal with it. I can barely read this article without getting emotional.

futurehero 6y ago
A community is a collection of individuals, each of whom may or may not feel pain in response to something that happens to less than 0.002% of Americans, and generally as a result of the deceased individual's own behavior. Collections of individuals do not experience pain as a collective. Many, if made aware, would still not care, because they manage to keep themselves out of jail, and barring that, manage to refrain from assaulting the correctional officers charged with maintaining order within the correctional system. Call them callous, but theirs is a way of being in the world that is no less valid than one that holds every individual's life worthy of special protection from the consequences of their unforced errors, and where these might be attributable to mental illness, there is a rational argument for putting the space and resources consumed by the mentally ill to better use. One wouldn't fill a spaceship full of mentally ill occupants where every individual's actions contribute to or harm the survival of the others, and it is not a huge leap to see the earth as a ship and the survival of it's occupants as far from guaranteed. It is straight forward to infer that that which increases net prosocial behavior within the species need not be resisted.
- notherthrowaway 6y ago
  Took the red one?
- bitdizzy 6y ago
  > Call them callous, but theirs is a way of being in the world that is no less valid than one that holds every individual's life worthy of special protection from the consequences of their unforced errors, and where these might be attributable to mental illness, there is a rational argument for putting the space and resources consumed by the mentally ill to better use. You've asserted that this eugenicist viewpoint is valid and is defensible but you don't present such a defense. Would you like to post a defense this position which is by no means obvious?

ry454 6y ago

This reminds me of what the Lincoln character said in the same named movie about the 13th amendment: "what you will be to our nation after this I don't know." Well, now we know.

dmix 6y ago

Defund police? If you must make them worse. How about redirecting it into the prison system instead of some fairy social justice grift?

kennywinker 6y ago
Just like over funding the police leads to over-policing, more funding for prisons would probably lead to more unnecessary incarceration, not better conditions. Incarceration is just fundamentally antithetical to rehabilitation. To quote Danielle Sered in this excellent On The Media interview on restorative justice: > The core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet one's economic needs. The four core features of prison are shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one's economic needs. (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-restorative-justice https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-med...)

ArnoVW 6y ago

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Fyodor Dostoevsky

pessimizer 6y ago
It's so obvious, and an absolutely accurate way to judge the quality of a jurisdiction. People in prison are the weakest people in society, weaker than children (who usually have the ability to walk away from home whenever they want, although they're subject to being searched for and returned.) As the weakest, nominally least deserving people, benefits given to the prison population filter through the culture. You can't give good health care to prisoners while people who haven't committed crimes (including the victims of those prisoners) go without. You can't give adequate housing to prisoners without giving it to everyone. You can't give free education to prisoners without giving it to everyone. You can't give prisoners freedom of speech without giving it to everyone. You can't give prisoners the vote (and convenient physical access to it) without giving it to everyone. Start with prisoners, and you elevate everything. Instead, in the US we racistly fantasize about interracial sexual assaults, make people shit in front of each other, and make them work for 15 cents an hour. It's obvious what society has to look like outside of the walls. And were not talking about prison here; this is jail. Everybody there is innocent. The state should keep them comfortable, and spend as much effort trying to come up with reasons why they are not guilty as reasons they are guilty. Instead, it's just pre-prison.
futurehero 6y ago
There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. 5000, or 0.2% of them, died in jail. A 99.8% chance of not dying in jail for those 2.3 million people is thus indicative of a society with high degree of civilization. Fyodor would call our jails health spas compared to what existed in Russia during his lifetime between 1821 and 1881.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > 5000, or 0.2% of them, died in jail. No, 5000 of them died in pre-trial detention. A lot more died in jail (which is a much larger set that includes most pretrial detention and a lot of other incarceration), and an even larger number died while incarcerated (an even larger set that is a superset of both of the previous ones.)

cm2187 6y ago

The article is pretty bad. It starts as an anecdote about an inmate beaten to death by the wards, like if it was representative, but then the overwhelming majority of deaths are a result of diseases, overdoses and suicides. Also no reference to the denominator, so you can’t really tell if there is an over mortality in jail vs outside (particularly for the subset of the population that is likely to end up in jail - drug addicts, people with mental problems, etc).

komali2 6y ago
Isn't the denominator a number that happens to also the vast majority of the world's imprisoned? Nothing you're saying makes me think any of this is ok lol.
- cm2187 6y ago
  Well, that’s the point. The larger the population in jail, the more likely you will have deaths in jails. It doesn’t means the death is caused by the imprisonment. Particularly for a high risk population.
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with your point in anyway, but just a point of reference: the article is talking about American jails, as opposed to American prisons. If I understand it correctly, once convicted, most people would be sent to a prison. I don't think such a distinction is made elsewhere (at least not in the UK).
  - futurehero 6y ago
    For reference, post-conviction, those sentenced to a year or less remain in jails, while those sentenced to a year and a day or more go to prisons. Prison is actually preferable over jail for most incarcerated individuals, as jails tend to be more tightly controlled than prisons, which function like their own societies with built-in, tractable hierarchies. People in prisons behave, in a sense, because they have to live together.
6y ago

komali2 6y ago

> The U.S. government collects detailed data on who’s dying in which jails around the country – but won’t let anyone see it. I want to know more about this. That's my data, as I am that for which the government exists. So who dares to withhold it from me? Have newspapers tried FOIA requests for it? This is the first I've heard of this data being withheld. Withheld by who? Edit: wow holy shit it's worse than I thought: > The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has collected inmate mortality data for two decades – but statistics for individual jails are withheld from the public, government officials and oversight agencies under a 1984 law limiting the release of BJS data. Agency officials say that discretion is critical because it encourages sheriffs and police to report their deaths data each year. They don't want to let people read the reports because they're afraid cops won't report their murders otherwise. Despicable. Now I have more reasons than ever to continue protesting.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
As you've noted, non-compliance with Federal oversight is part of the game. They intentionally don't want numbers to reflect poorly on the penal institutions of the US.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
They don't release the data because if they did, then the gov fears the jail would then start mis-reporting their data or obfuscating the actual data. By doing so, they kind of give a pass to the jails in order to get them to report more accurate numbers. But don't worry, Reuters did their own data analysis: Because the government won’t release jail-by-jail death data, Reuters compiled its own. The news organization tracked jail deaths over the dozen years from 2008 to 2019 to create the largest such database outside of the Justice Department. Reporters filed more than 1,500 records requests to obtain information about deaths in 523 U.S. jails – every jail with an average population of 750 or more inmates, and the 10 largest jails or jail systems in nearly every state. Together, those jails hold an average of some 450,000 inmates a day, or about three out of every five nationwide. The results were predictable: Reuters is making the full data it gathered available to the public. One finding: Since the last Justice Department report, for 2016, the death rate in big jails has continued to climb, leaving it up 8% in 2019, the highest point in the 12-year period of 2008-2019 examined by Reuters. In that time, the suicide rate declined as many facilities launched suicide awareness and response initiatives. But the death rate from drug and alcohol overdoses rose about 72% amid the opioid epidemic. So alcohol and opioid OD's accounted for most of the deaths. Not mishandling by the staff or as the first story in the article highlighted, an inmate who was beat to death by the prison guards. Which begs the question, how are drug addicts ODing while they are being incarcerated? Don't they have resources to get these people help with their withdrawal and treatment??

aaomidi 6y ago

This is absolutely fucking bonkers. Why are we literally fine with this? When are we going to draw the line? Is this the bystander effect in the scale of an entire country? "Oh I'm waiting for someone else to start taking action first" And then some people have the audacity to criticize people taking direct action while they're living in their single family homes, completely oblivious to what's happening to thousands of their country-people. I'm disappointed in us.

komali2 6y ago
We are protesting. We're forcing politicians to put themselves on one side or the other of a line by asking them whether they believe Black lives matter. If you aren't seeing protests, I invite you to simply start one one your own. If your politicians aren't reacting, visit a local one with your cell phone camera on and ask them if Black lives matter. I've been twisting the screws like this on some local shithead conservative politicians and it's honestly kinda fun to watch them squirm.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  I am seeing them and I'm pretty active in the Seattle ones. I'm just disappointed that so many people aren't active in them. What % of Americans do you think know there is nearly daily protests happening in nearly every metro area? 10%? 20%?
  - coffeemaniac 6y ago
    I feel like a lot of the people I'm around every day know, but since most of my socialization is in a work context we don't talk about it much. Maybe others are similar. Thank you for being out there. Politicians need to hear from people on the streets.
s5300 6y ago
But they're bad people. Didn't you hear? Weren't you told?
huge87 6y ago

devindotcom 6y ago

Good on Reuters for investigating and sharing this data. The jail system is a wreck and people with mental health issues do not have good outcomes in it. I worked with these folks on the mental health side years ago and we avoided putting our people in King County Jail whenever at all possible for a lot of reasons. Support in the form of mental health professionals, other social workers, and basic training for the cops and corrections officers is severely lacking. Some of my guys would be in and out of KCJ dozens of times for minor charges, which would interrupt what little treatment and stability they had, sometimes catastrophically. Between that and the ER visits they were probably costing the city and state tens of thousands a year. Considering how cheap housing was when we could find it and the incredibly powerful effect it had on their lives and outcomes, it felt like the system was robbing itself while making everyone worse off in the process. And Seattle is known for being a compassionate, responsive city for this stuff! How it must be in other places I can't even imagine.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>, it felt like the system was robbing itself while making everyone worse off in the process. More like robbing the taxpayers to pay you (assuming your agency was state funded), the guards, the food supplier, etc. etc. Thousands of livelihoods are supported by crappy prisons and the war on drugs.
- jjones2 6y ago
  The only thing we should be "at war with" is this pathetic excuse for a fucking government. The jail system couldn't even keep the worlds number one criminal from being brutally murdered, with the guards sleeping and the tapes "not working" (Epstein)
  - komali2 6y ago
    Agreed probably but I would consider el chapo to be the world's number one incarcerated criminal.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

lolbrels 6y ago

>TURNAROUND, TRAGEDY: Harvey Hill’s life was on track, his family said, before his trespassing arrest. REUTERS/Hill family handout Makes his criminal activity sound like an inconvenience to himself. Simplest way to avoid dying in jail is to not be a criminal because the reality is you will not be treated like a human being. But that should be implied because society has deemed your life better spent locked away in a cage out of sight out of mind. Source I found states ~2.3million currently incarcerated, 700,000 of those for violent crimes. .2% mortality rate actually quite impressive to me considering the circumstances and I would guess of those 5000 the one the article references is an outlier considering the events leading to the death seem a bit suspicious - enough to write a story I guess.

lalaland1125 6y ago

If you are interested in helping fix this problem, I would highly recommend looking into local initiatives to eliminate cash bail; they can significantly reduce the pre-trial prison population. https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/new-jersey-set-out-to-reform-its-cash-bail-system-now-the-results-are-in/ https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/new-jersey-set-out-to... indicates that these cash bail elimination policies significantly reduce the number of people in jail pre-trial. If you are in California, we have a unique opportunity to eliminate cash bail this year by voting yes on Prop 25. I would highly recommend voting yes on Prop 25. Note that you can register to vote all the way up till November 3rd (we have same day registration here in California so you can register while voting).

mkolodny 6y ago
Prop 25 is definitely an improvement. It forces jails to release people who were accused of most misdemeanors within 12 hours. I think more still needs to be done. Both police officers in the streets and officers guarding jails should be held accountable for their actions. Police brutality anywhere should be prosecuted.