Short stints in local jails can turn into horrific death sentences.
Every year, dozens of Pennsylvania prisoners die needlessly in county jails operating without oversight. Most are pre-trail detainees charged with minor crimes for which they haven’t been convicted. A few serve sentences of less than two years for low-level offenses. Allegheny County’s jail, holding about 1,500 prisoners, is more lethal than most. Since April 2020, 16 prisoners have died there, a rate double the national average.
Here and around the state, jails are in urgent need of independent oversight, unfettered by the tunnel vision of institutional bias. Autonomy is essential to holding people accountable. Only fresh eyes can prescribe life-saving solutions that break with the past and suggest new ways of managing and thinking about corrections.
In an interview Tuesday, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said he is working with legislators, including state Rep. Austin Davis and state Sen. Jay Costa of Allegheny County, to establish statewide reviews of county jail fatalities. Given the health care crisis in Pennsylvania’s 73 jails, the General Assembly should approve such legislation as soon as possible.
External reviews of jail fatalities, Mr. Fitzgerald said, would operate similarly to the state’s 15-year-old Child Death Review program, which requires counties to work with review teams investigating the deaths of people ages 21 and under.
The proposed authority for jail fatalities would include medical, correctional and judicial professionals. Review teams should also, by law, include one or two former prisoners. Investigators will need people with ground-level experiences in the problems and circumstances they encounter.
Preventable deaths
Ideally, review teams would operate under a commission or body with the authority to enforce reforms and standards, as does a commission on jail standards in Texas. At minimum, the legislation should require all counties to participate in the reviews and to report all jail fatalities to the administrative body over the review teams. A reliable statewide registrar of jail deaths is essential in defining the scope of the problem, developing best practices, measuring progress and identifying trends.
The under-reporting of in-custody deaths is a national scandal. Many jails don’t report fatalities or exclude prisoner deaths in hospitals, even though the prisoner was in-custody. The federal Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 requires jails to include the hospital deaths of prisoners in their counts.
An estimated 56 prisoners in Pennsylvania jails died in 2020. Nationwide, more than 1,100 prisoners a year die in local jails, reports the U.S. Department of Justice.
Most fatalities are preventable. Diversion programs, better mental health care and screening at intake, rigorous monitoring of jail cells, responsive medical care, restricting the use of solitary, cells designed to prevent suicides, and better trained jail staffs can determine whether a prisoner lives or dies.
In examining the events and circumstances leading to jail fatalities, commission members will, inevitably, encounter the system’s flaws. Likewise, their recommendations on policies and protocols should cover housing, intake procedures, diversion, mental health and drug treatment, and other systemic practices.
Holding jails accountable
The high number of jail fatalities in Allegheny County has Mr. Fitzgerald’s attention. Last month, he authorized contracting with the National Commission on Correctional Health Care to conduct an independent review of jail fatalities. The county and NCCHC are finalizing the contract, and investigations should start this year.
An earlier NCCHC contract with Allegheny County produced a suicide prevention report in late 2019 that appeared to reduce suicides, the leading cause of jail deaths nationwide. Since then, the county jail has reported only one suicide.
Up to now, reviews of jail fatalities have consisted of internal investigations and rulings by the local medical examiner. Narrow in scope, those investigations have not shown whether jails could have prevented a death, or the role neglect, incompetence and indifference played in it. A death by “natural causes” simply excludes external causes like murder. A medical examiner ruling of suicide says nothing about whether the jail failed to properly monitor the prisoner or assess his mental state during intake.
In advocating statewide reviews of jail fatalities and a NCCHC study of those in Allegheny County, Mr. Fitzgerald will help bring independent oversight to the Allegheny County Jail and, potentially, jails statewide. That’s a step toward holding Pennsylvania’s dysfunctional jails accountable and providing more humane and effective ways to treat the more than 100,000 people who enter and leave them every year.
First Published: September 17, 2022, 3:00 p.m.