Why 4,998 died in U.S. jails before their day in court

>, it felt like the system was robbing itself while making everyone worse off in the process.

More like robbing the taxpayers to pay you (assuming your agency was state funded), the guards, the food supplier, etc. etc.

Thousands of livelihoods are supported by crappy prisons and the war on drugs.

Prop 25 is definitely an improvement. It forces jails to release people who were accused of most misdemeanors within 12 hours.

I think more still needs to be done. Both police officers in the streets and officers guarding jails should be held accountable for their actions. Police brutality anywhere should be prosecuted.

We are protesting. We're forcing politicians to put themselves on one side or the other of a line by asking them whether they believe Black lives matter.

If you aren't seeing protests, I invite you to simply start one one your own. If your politicians aren't reacting, visit a local one with your cell phone camera on and ask them if Black lives matter. I've been twisting the screws like this on some local shithead conservative politicians and it's honestly kinda fun to watch them squirm.

But they're bad people. Didn't you hear? Weren't you told?

I'm assuming you're doing something to correct this situation if you're this "disappointed in us" for our collective inaction. So, what have you done?

It's so obvious, and an absolutely accurate way to judge the quality of a jurisdiction. People in prison are the weakest people in society, weaker than children (who usually have the ability to walk away from home whenever they want, although they're subject to being searched for and returned.) As the weakest, nominally least deserving people, benefits given to the prison population filter through the culture. You can't give good health care to prisoners while people who haven't committed crimes (including the victims of those prisoners) go without. You can't give adequate housing to prisoners without giving it to everyone. You can't give free education to prisoners without giving it to everyone. You can't give prisoners freedom of speech without giving it to everyone. You can't give prisoners the vote (and convenient physical access to it) without giving it to everyone.

Start with prisoners, and you elevate everything. Instead, in the US we racistly fantasize about interracial sexual assaults, make people shit in front of each other, and make them work for 15 cents an hour. It's obvious what society has to look like outside of the walls.

And were not talking about prison here; this is jail. Everybody there is innocent. The state should keep them comfortable, and spend as much effort trying to come up with reasons why they are not guilty as reasons they are guilty. Instead, it's just pre-prison.

There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. 5000, or 0.2% of them, died in jail. A 99.8% chance of not dying in jail for those 2.3 million people is thus indicative of a society with high degree of civilization. Fyodor would call our jails health spas compared to what existed in Russia during his lifetime between 1821 and 1881.

You don't even have to go into a prison to hear people in the US gleefully celebrating the misery that takes place there.

Prison rape is treated as something to laugh about, not as unconscionable violence.

A community is a collection of individuals, each of whom may or may not feel pain in response to something that happens to less than 0.002% of Americans, and generally as a result of the deceased individual's own behavior. Collections of individuals do not experience pain as a collective. Many, if made aware, would still not care, because they manage to keep themselves out of jail, and barring that, manage to refrain from assaulting the correctional officers charged with maintaining order within the correctional system. Call them callous, but theirs is a way of being in the world that is no less valid than one that holds every individual's life worthy of special protection from the consequences of their unforced errors, and where these might be attributable to mental illness, there is a rational argument for putting the space and resources consumed by the mentally ill to better use. One wouldn't fill a spaceship full of mentally ill occupants where every individual's actions contribute to or harm the survival of the others, and it is not a huge leap to see the earth as a ship and the survival of it's occupants as far from guaranteed. It is straight forward to infer that that which increases net prosocial behavior within the species need not be resisted.

Governments like that interest free cash.

For serious crimes, because criminals would flee.

For non-serious crimes we really shouldn't.

But "cashless bail" has downsides. People are more likely to just skip hearings. Or they keep committing minor crimes because they don't view themselves as facing consequences.

Theoretically, two reasons: flight risk, and if you think the person is probably guilty, risk of re-offence. IMO flight risk isn't a real concern most of the time, and the modern surveillance state makes flight much more difficult than in ye olden days. I'm not keen on keeping suspects locked up on risk of re-offence, either; it seems a total violation of presumption of innocence.

You ever hear that thing where we don't hire people if they may be in debt for jobs that are said to matter or be a risk?

Well, we have this thing called civil forfeiture...

It lets you take somebody's money if you're a cop.

So let's say you're a cop in need of some money.

You can simply pull somebody over, among others things... and... take their money

Well, what would you do if somebody just took your money? You might want to tell on them, or at least get your money back.

Easiest way to not get told on with consequence if you stole somebody's money? Put them in jail with the powers vested in you...

> Why do we detain people before they're proven guilty?

There are a lot of reasons to do this. The real question is why the detention is designed to be punitive, and why can you pay to get out of it?

As you've noted, non-compliance with Federal oversight is part of the game. They intentionally don't want numbers to reflect poorly on the penal institutions of the US.

They don't release the data because if they did, then the gov fears the jail would then start mis-reporting their data or obfuscating the actual data. By doing so, they kind of give a pass to the jails in order to get them to report more accurate numbers.

But don't worry, Reuters did their own data analysis:

Because the government won’t release jail-by-jail death data, Reuters compiled its own. The news organization tracked jail deaths over the dozen years from 2008 to 2019 to create the largest such database outside of the Justice Department. Reporters filed more than 1,500 records requests to obtain information about deaths in 523 U.S. jails – every jail with an average population of 750 or more inmates, and the 10 largest jails or jail systems in nearly every state. Together, those jails hold an average of some 450,000 inmates a day, or about three out of every five nationwide.

The results were predictable:

Reuters is making the full data it gathered available to the public.

One finding: Since the last Justice Department report, for 2016, the death rate in big jails has continued to climb, leaving it up 8% in 2019, the highest point in the 12-year period of 2008-2019 examined by Reuters. In that time, the suicide rate declined as many facilities launched suicide awareness and response initiatives. But the death rate from drug and alcohol overdoses rose about 72% amid the opioid epidemic.

So alcohol and opioid OD's accounted for most of the deaths. Not mishandling by the staff or as the first story in the article highlighted, an inmate who was beat to death by the prison guards.

Which begs the question, how are drug addicts ODing while they are being incarcerated? Don't they have resources to get these people help with their withdrawal and treatment??

Isn't the denominator a number that happens to also the vast majority of the world's imprisoned?

Nothing you're saying makes me think any of this is ok lol.