Almost a quarter of inmates who died from violence behind bars in Louisiana over a six-year period were housed primarily in local jails and had not yet been convicted of the crimes of which they were accused, a recent report by Loyola University found.
The study was conducted by Loyola Law students who gathered records of the 1,168 in-custody deaths reported between 2015 and 2021 in Louisiana’s prisons, jails and youth detention centers.
When they looked beyond violent deaths and included medical issues, drug overdoses, accidents and suicides, the researchers found about 14% overall were pretrial inmates, highlighting what they say are significant problems in how Louisiana’s jails handle people before they get their day in court.
“Those are the people who have been detained pending trial, so they haven’t had a chance to be found innocent or guilty,” said Andrea Armstrong, a professor at Loyola University’s College of Law and the report’s lead author. “That’s concerning to me.”
While the data doesn’t necessarily provide answers for why the deaths happened, Armstrong said the way the state operates its pretrial facilities likely contributes heavily to the number of deaths behind bars.
Many factors set Louisiana’s jails apart from its prisons, she said. To start, jails generally have less robust health care systems than prisons because they’re designed for short-term detention, not long-term stays like state-run facilities, which means the medical service providers that parishes work with tend to cater to a more transient incarcerated population.
Sheriffs are also largely left to their own discretion when it comes to seeking outside medical help for people who are brought into the facility while suffering from severe addiction or mental health crises, which can play a role in deaths from suicides and overdoses, Armstrong continued.
“When you’re in a prison or jail, you can’t just go see your own doctor,” she said. “You are completely dependent on the health care that is provided to you within the jail.”
When it comes to violent deaths, Armstrong said, many assaults took place in cells, which could indicate problems with screening, classification or housing assignments made by intake officials.
She noted that the report found several such deaths occurred at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, which for years has recorded some of the largest inmate populations and highest death rates in the state.
Casey Rayborn Hicks, spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, said EBRPP’s violent death rate is low in comparison to its population numbers, but pointed out that the parish’s facility did see a dramatic increase in inmates suffering from mental illnesses as it grappled with multiple suicides following the closure or privatization of several state hospitals in the early 2010s.
She said workers who believe someone is showing signs of mental illness are trained to notify medical staff — who are employed by the city-parish through an independent private contractor — to evaluate the patient and determine the next steps for treating the individual.
Still, the high number of people being booked into the facility on a daily basis can place an overwhelming amount of pressure on the jail’s resources.
“It definitely creates a strain on the system,” Hicks said.
Though a year-by-year breakdown of pretrial deaths provided by the university shows that those numbers have actually declined somewhat since 2015, Armstrong, who emphasized that a small percentage of pretrial deaths do occur at facilities other than local jails, said looking only at those deaths obscures how many actually occur at parish-run facilities, regardless of trial status.
While pretrial deaths were down, parish jail-based deaths made up a larger share of overall in-custody deaths — about 26% of them, Armstrong said. She attributes that to a steep increase in deaths among people who were serving convictions in parish jails, not pretrial detainees.
Armstrong also pointed out that unnatural deaths — which refers to those not related to medical illnesses — increased during the report’s time frame, with roughly a quarter taking place at parish jails.
The study found that more than 61% of suicides occurred in local detention centers, compared to 29% in state prisons and 5% in private facilities. Similarly, almost 54% of drug-related deaths occurred at local facilities.
Armstrong theorized that one reason for this can be attributed to Louisiana’s system of housing half of people serving state sentences for convictions at local jails, rather than at state facilities. The practice is fairly unique: As of 2019, 48 states held fewer than 5% of their prisoners in local jails.
“It’s impacting pretrial populations,” Armstrong said. “If you have a population that has an average length of stay of two months, you may not have in place the types of chronic care and illness management that you’d need if your average length of stay was five years.”
Hicks, with East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office, said many issues seen inside local jails can be representative of similar problems in the greater community.
“As drug overdoses are reaching historic levels, we see correlating increases inside jail facilities,” she said. “With the rise of overdoses from the extremely lethal drug fentanyl in recent years, these numbers continue to rise at alarming rates.”
Hicks said intercepting contraband, particularly drugs, poses unique difficulties for jails, but emphasized that EBRPP takes smuggling seriously and fully investigates every case.
Still, unless something changes, Armstrong predicts death rates inside Louisiana’s jails will continue to rise. She said sentencing practices, like mandatory minimums and automatic life-without-parole, inflate the state’s incarcerated population, adding even more strain on its prison and jail health care systems and leading to more deaths overall.
“We need to think about, what does health care look like for this population, and what were they actually sentenced to?” Armstrong said. “They weren’t necessarily sentenced to a shorter life expectancy, even if they were sentenced to serve out the remainder of their life in prison.”
Leave a Reply