US prison deaths soared in 2020, new study finds

(CN) — A new analysis of U.S. prison mortality released Friday revealed that overall death rates in 2020 increased 77% from the previous year, underscoring the profound effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on facilities nationwide and widespread inconsistencies in reporting incarcerated deaths.

The research published in Science Advances represents the most comprehensive analysis of in-custody deaths from 2020 to date. It encompasses record requests on behalf of the researchers involved and some publicly available data, when necessary, from 49 state and federal Departments of Corrections across the U.S.

Lead author Naomi Sugie, an associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California Irvine, explained that before the study, nobody understood the actual toll of the pandemic on U.S. prisons systematically and nationally. The study itself, she said, follows her involvement in PrisonPandemic, a project that began in 2020 after California prisons instituted lockdowns to contain the Covid-19 virus, ultimately reducing facility communication and transparency down to zero.

“We staffed a hotline and started this archival project hearing what people were going through in California prisons,” Sugie said in an interview. “And the conditions that people were describing were so dire and upsetting and really just violations of their health and, some may argue, human rights.”

From there, Sugie and 10 other researchers from UC Irvine and Brigham and Women’s Hospital decided to pore over collected records to compare all annual U.S. prison deaths between 2013 and 2020. What they found is that total mortality not only increased by 77% in 2020 from 2019 — a rate over three times that of the general population — but that some facilities did not even record the causes of deaths that year.

As indicated in the study, some states did not report custody information or more specific mortality information, including death month, age group or the manner of death. The substantial variation in how U.S. prisons recorded inmate deaths led the researchers to conclude that Covid-19 mortality numbers severely understated the impact of the pandemic on prison populations.

One example comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2022, which reported that roughly 2,500 U.S. prisoners died of Covid-19-related causes between March 2020 and February 2021. But what this number doesn’t reflect is how mortality rates of natural deaths — including those unaffiliated with Covid-19 — increased in 2020 along with unnatural deaths, such as those by suicide, accident, homicide, trauma or overdose.

Sugie explained that more surprising and disturbing increases were those of the unknown causes in 2020, particularly since prisons in California, Oregon, Missouri, Maryland and New York already had a practice of reporting high numbers of unknown causes before the pandemic.

“These steep increases suggest systemic failures that simultaneously increased risk of illness and limited access to medical care,” the authors wrote, adding that staff shortages and limited medical resources fell short of meeting the primary and specialty health care needs of prison populations.

Another point the authors highlight is how pandemic-related measures, including lockdowns, restricted movement or solitary confinement instead of medical isolation, all contributed to prisoner anxiety, stress and other mental health conditions.

“For all of those deaths that are related to the pandemic, for various ways, we don’t know about them because they’re not officially coded as Covid-related to us,” Sugie said. “It’s also that a lot of states didn’t test systemically, so even if someone died of Covid, their death may not have been recorded as Covid-related formally just like how it was in the general population during that time period.”

Additionally, the authors note that the total mortality increases from prisons in 2020 mask significant variation between states, such as those two and three times higher that year for Illinois and New Jersey, respectively. Under another analysis, they found that areas with higher Covid-19 positivity rates around the prisons corresponded to increased mortality rates of people in the facilities.

The latter finding, the authors wrote, “suggests that prison staff remained important vectors of Covid-19 transmission, despite widespread prison visitor prohibitions and lockdowns in 2020 intended to prevent Covid-19 spread into prisons from the surrounding communities.”

Overall, the researchers argue that their findings indicate a need for better policies on preventing future pandemics and how there’s a fundamental lack of data transparency around deaths in prison facilities. They write that, despite the Death in Custody Act Reporting Act, there has been no publicly available information about mortality in U.S. prisons since 2019.

“In a country with extremely high incarceration rates, fully understanding the mortality toll of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States requires accounting for incarcerated people,” the authors write.

This is especially true, they add, since incarcerated people disproportionately experience health risks, endure economic disadvantage and are more likely to be people of color — underscoring the need to account for this population for studying mortality and health inequalities.

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