indy-star

Sometime around 2017 we noticed a growing number of individual reports about people dying in jails across the state, including some really egregious cases. But we quickly discovered no one appeared to be tracking these deaths or examining them in a comprehensive manner. So we set out to see what we could learn about how many people were dying in Indiana jails and why. People who took their own lives was the single leading manner of death, far above the national average for jails. (We’re going to respect the rules against discussion of suicide, so we don’t plan to get too detailed specifically on that part of our investigation.)

Tim and I are just creating job security for our editors. -RYAN

Just for clarity: in Indiana there are federal prisons, state prisons and local jails. We focused on the jails, which are mostly full of people who were recently arrested and are not convicted of a crime. One out of the 92 jails is run by a for-profit company. That’s in Indianapolis, but the contract is ending in the next couple months.

Along the lines of your question, though: Almost every Indiana jail has a medical contract with one of two for-profit companies, who then make decisions on when someone gets to see a doctor, what type of medication they are allowed to take, etc. And someone who has a prescription outside of jail is not automatically allowed to bring that with them into jail. One other challenge is that Medicaid is cut off for someone the moment they walk into jail, which means the costs of their care become the responsibility of the county. We found several examples where profit motives and other cost considerations may have impacted the level of care provided to people who said they needed treatment. -RYAN

When we started reporting, we thought we would discover some clear contrasts somewhere, like maybe rural jails have a tougher time than our more urban jails (or vice versa). But what we found is that the big problems that lead to deadly conditions are found in just about every jail in Indiana. We found 75 of Indiana's 92 jails had at least one death since 2010. It was no surprise that the bigger-city jails were responsible for more deaths overall, but several rural counties saw multiple deaths too. And, when compared against the sizes of jail populations, a rural county had the worst rate of them all.

There are some widely regarded “industry” guidelines (some vary based on the design of jails) but here in Indiana our state department of correction is charged with setting and enforcing standards. And, from what we could determine, that is a very subjective determination from a state agency that is about as opaque as it gets. One of our stories had a headline calling the state’s standards “effectively meaningless.”

Again, the only real accountability over these issues seems to come from civil lawsuits filed by families and advocacy groups such as the ACLU of Indiana, which have resulted in improvements and even new jail construction in some counties. The U.S. Department of Justice could also intervene if investigators found a federal civil rights violation. -TIM