While deaths resulting from police shootings or violent arrests have become the focus of calls for criminal justice reform, the vast majority of jail deaths still go largely unexamined.
The Columbia County Jail is pictured Saturday, March 30, 2019, in St. “Nobody even within the county - in most places - has any idea who’s in the jail and how they got there.” “The lack of good national data and the lack of data even at the state level about what’s going on in local jails is really sort of striking and frightening,” said Nancy Fishman, project director for the Center on Sentencing and Corrections at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit that focuses on criminal justice issues.
And year after year, people die of suicides that could be prevented or medical conditions that should be treated. The deceased and their loved ones can be robbed of their chance at justice.
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They say they are in the dark about how many people have even died in jail, let alone how to prevent those deaths.Īs a result, long-festering problems avoid the spotlight. State lawmakers who could improve funding, staff training or standards have taken little action. Meanwhile, the federal government’s numbers are outdated and undercounted because they rely on voluntary reporting from jails. State authorities leave detailed tracking to the federal government. Instead, the current system conceals the true circumstances of these deaths. If they did, they would find a crisis of rising death rates in overburdened jails that have been set up to fail the inmates they are tasked with keeping safe. Until now, that number was unknown, in part because Oregon and Washington have not comprehensively tracked those deaths in county jails. Since 2008, at least 306 people across the Northwest have died after being taken to a county jail, according to an investigation by OPB, KUOW and the Northwest News Network. The medical examiner determined she died from internal bleeding caused by pancreatitis. Less than an hour after that, she was dead. Eight days later she was moaning, asking for water and saying she was dying. In 2018, 53-year-old Jacqueline Cowans was booked at the Lane County Jail in Eugene, Oregon, on three warrants: burglary, possession of a stolen vehicle and unlawful delivery of methadone. Responders saved one, but 44-year-old Jason Shaw later died at a Portland hospital. Helens, Oregon, two inmates attempted suicide on the same day. One year later, in the Columbia County Jail in St.
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