It’s estimated that over 7,500 people died while incarcerated in American jails between 2008 and 2019. About two-thirds of those held in jails had not yet stood trial to determine whether they were guilty of the crimes for which they had been indicted. For some of these people, a charged crime — without a conviction — has resulted in illness and sometimes death.

Upfront, it’s important to note jails are different from prisons in a few crucial ways. Unlike most prisons, jails serve two purposes — to house those who are arrested until they go to trial or to incarcerate those convicted of less serious crimes for shorter sentences. Responsibility for managing jails lands on local governments and local law enforcement that are chronically short of space and resources.

Tight budgets mean jails often rely on private inmate healthcare providers with documented patterns of inadequate care and staffing along with higher death rates than agency-run healthcare. Jails that used private healthcare providers saw inmate mortality rates up to 58 percent higher than jails that did not.

To make matters worse, densely populated jails exacerbate hygiene problems, mental and physical sickness, and inmate unrest. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these conditions. As of March 2021, nearly 2,800 jail and prison inmates had died of the virus. Overcrowding combined with a novel virus and substandard healthcare has proven disastrous, made even worse by decisions to withhold vaccines from incarcerated populations, including high-risk elderly inmates and those comorbidities that increase vulnerability to the virus.  

To reduce inmate population density at the onset of the pandemic, states released a combined 170,000 people from jails and prisons who had committed misdemeanors and other minor crimes in 2020. It’s clear from some of the public reaction to these policies that concerns for public safety and prison health can be a difficult balance to strike. We need to look to tools like risk assessments and electronic monitoring for home confinement as part of the answer to this dilemma. And, most of all, we need to get shots into inmate arms.

The post Jailed state: Addressing the deadly inertia of America’s jails appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.