"Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Observer that today’s dearth of reporting requirements reflects a current criminal justice culture that is 'punitive [and] secretive about what’s happening inside our facilities.' Deitch’s own research confirms the state supplies little to no information to the public on prisoner treatment or conditions. 'The data that is required to be kept by statute doesn’t go into issues of safety or health,' she said. 'It goes into things like how many people are incarcerated or parole rates or how much things cost. … It’s not providing us with a window into what’s happening.'”

"Michele Deitch, director of UT’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, is familiar with the conditions at the state’s oldest prisons. 'In some ways, I’m more shocked that we bought 100,000 beds in the Nineties when air conditioning was common and didn’t put air conditioning in these facilities.'”

"Michele Deitch of UT’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab listed the commonly understood reasons for the increase in suicides. 'Understaffing certainly contributes to people dying by suicide, because incarcerated people are not being adequately supervised or checked frequently enough or because staff can’t get to them quickly enough after an attempt,' Deitch said."

“'There are certainly members of the public that believe that people who are incarcerated deserve whatever they get,” she said. “They don’t really care what happens to people who are inside. We don’t have a money problem, we have a give a damn problem.'” PJIL Director Michele Deitch

"Most states make those free supplies available only upon request. As a result, many women still face a lack of access that Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, described as 'absolutely unacceptable.'”

"'Families typically can't find out why their loved one died, or what's happening in the investigation, or they may not even be notified about it,' said Michele Deitch, director of UT Austin's Prison and Jail Innovation Lab."

"'I think it's extremely troubling that the state is making money on the backs of people who are incarcerated,' said Michele Deitch, executive director of the University of Texas' Prison and Jail Innovation Lab. 'And that's true, whether it is a profit making enterprise or even just to operate the prisons on a daily basis.'"

"'You're taking vulnerable kids and putting them with very powerful staff who have the ability to not only make their daily lives miserable or more comfortable, but also can affect their ability to get out of the facilities,' says Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. 'You've got to start by acknowledging that there are so many kids who should never be in these settings at all.'"

"'Even if a lot of the deaths aren't formally attributable to COVID, we know that there were disproportionate numbers of deaths during that time period, and people were also dying from other conditions that they shouldn't have been dying from,' Deitch told Axios."

"'It's pretty obvious that it's not a priority [in Austin],' Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Current at the time. 'I think what it will take for it to pass the legislature is for them to recognize the humanity of everybody who both lives and works at those facilities.'"