How many people die each year in jails and prisons? No one knows

Reminds of that story of that girl that was driving without a license, so she got arrested. She then developped a very, very painful spinal fungal infection and was on the verge of dying while medical overseers just thought she was faking it for drugs. She finally managed to get medical treatment where she was told she was hours away from dying and so fortunately managed to live. Unfortunately, when she tried to sue because of the negligence by the prison staff, she found out she had a very small window to make the suit otherwise she waives her rights and it had already elapsed.

Point is that people just don't care about anything related to prisons, everyone just assumes it's all guilty trash.

At the start of the article there is this statement:

"There were at least nine drug-related deaths"

I can't wrap my head around this, I know that smuggling drugs into jails is relatively common practice in the US but it seems like we have just normalised this when we shouldn't have. A jail is a facility that the government has complete control over and even more relaxed restrictions on what they can subject people to, so how does this happen? Aren't their CCTV cameras everywhere? Microphones? Surely these incidents should be so well tracked and then some sort plan formed to prevent this, or if the guards are corrupt and enabling this maximal punishment.

Don't even get me started on allowing prisoners to control the food supply of other prisoners... just seems like such an obviously bad idea.

This is inexcusable in a supposedly first-world country. It also puts the lie to statements like "racism is over." It isn't even attenuated in police and prison guard culture. It you want a fright, go look at cop forums, groups, channels, etc. online.

On top of all that, prison food, commissary, media, and phone calls are all farming prisoners and their families for money.

Counterpoint to consider.

According to the CDC the USA death rate is 1.04% - i.e. for every 100K people, 1043 will die in any given year.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

The LA jails (referenced in this article) has most recently had a population of approx 15,000 'residents' at any givern time in the last few years.

So statistically, you are more likely (by many times) to die outside this prison, than inside it.

Any government agency that does not answer every request for information is hopelessly corrupt and must be defunded.

In exactly the same way, no one knows how many Americans are killed by law enforcement officers, either.

A cynical person might believe that this was deliberate, and wonder why these various "corrections" and law organizations get to police themselves.

The idea that people get out of prison and their life goes on is largely Hollywood. Mostly prison means life is over. They may get out but they won't be long for the world.