More people are dying behind bars in Louisiana. A new report from Incarceration Transparency released Monday reveals an uptick in total and “unnatural” deaths — meaning deaths not related to medical illness — between 2015 and 2021.
Among the leading cause of the rise in jail deaths were suicide, drug overdose and violent death. Andrea Armstrong, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans’ College of Law and lead author of the report, said she was surprised to see “high points and peak levels” of drug overdose and violent death, in particular.
“I was really struck by the increasing share of unnatural deaths in 2020 and 2021,” Armstrong said. “I was expecting a higher prevalence of COVID-related death. I was not expecting to see a rise in unnatural deaths.”
The report is tied to a seminar course that Armstrong teaches while managing the Incarceration Transparency project.Since the fall of 2019, Loyola law students have gathered death records from across Louisiana’s prisons, jails, and youth detention centers. Researchers who collected and analyzed the data attributed changes to the state’s prison and jail environments caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Visitation was suspended for extended periods of time, programming and classes for high school degrees or learning a trade were suspended, and in many cases, outdoor recreation was suspended,” Armstrong said. “We also saw that prison and jail staff were hit pretty hard with COVID. And so we see pretty sharp rises in vacancy rates for those staff positions. And if you don't have staff in the facility, then it's harder to escort folks to various appointments that they might need outside of the facility or even just to move them around within the facility.”
Armstrong said that much of the data is consistent with the state’s incarceration patterns. Black men between the ages of 55 to 60 who are serving a conviction were the most impacted group. Medical illness was the overall primary cause of death, with heart disease and cancer as the leading medical causes of death.
COVID-19 was recorded as a contributing cause of death for 48 people by facility officials and was responsible for approximately 18% of the 272 medical deaths from January 2020 to December 2021. Of all respiratory deaths between 2015-2021, almost half occurred in 2020 and 2021.
Drug overdoses and suicides were highest in 2021 of all years analyzed, with the number of drug overdoses accounting for 11.29% of the year’s total deaths, and the number of suicides making up 8.29% of the year’s total deaths. Violent deaths accounted for 2.14% of all deaths between 2015-2021, hitting a peak of 3.3% in 2020.
Armstrong also noted that for certain categories of unnatural deaths, the majority occurred in parish jails. She said Louisiana is relatively unique in that it houses around 50% of the people serving a state sentence or a conviction in local jails instead of in state-operated prisons.
“So when we looked at cause of death, for instance, we saw that for drugs, more than the majority of deaths were occurring in parish jails and were impacting both people detained pretrial, as well as people who were convicted of a crime,” Armstrong said. “And that was true for drugs, for suicides and then also for accidents.”
None of the 1,168 known deaths were on death row. All were either detained before their trial, serving a sentence or were detained for a parole or probation violation. For Armstrong and the Incarceration Transparency project, the report will highlight conditions in the state’s prisons and jails, and hopefully spur change in the way Louisiana treats its incarcerated people.
“I think we need to understand that there are people who have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment, who have not been sentenced to death, who are nevertheless dying — in some cases due to preventable causes,” Armstrong said. “And we should ask ourselves, is that fair?”
The report compiled death records from every facility that provided them in response to their requests. However, some facilities did not respond or did not have records to provide, so the report states that the findings are a “snapshot of known deaths behind bars.” The real numbers are likely higher.
“The way that I frame it is that we know that at least 1,168 people died behind bars since 2015 to 2021 in Louisiana. But that's at least a minimum,” Armstrong said. “I am confident that there are deaths that have occurred that are not included in our database.”
Click here to read Incarceration Transparency’s full report.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
