The US prison population is aging rapidly, and incarcerated seniors are not getting the care they need.

Maryland prisons rank among nation’s worst for killings

“A secure cell is the basic building block of jail safety,” said Michele Deitch, a corrections policy expert at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied jail conditions. “If you don’t have that, everything else becomes more difficult.”

The fact that Delaware has a committee intended to monitor the quality of health care in its prisons puts it ahead of a growing, nationwide movement toward greater transparency and accountability for how the government treats those it imprisons.

High-profile defendant fit risk factors for jail suicides, experts say

As researcher Michele Deitch explained in a 2020 report for Arizona State University, the state’s prisons have been under scrutiny for more than a decade for a variety of reasons: inadequate supervision and suicide prevention, broken locks on cell doors, high rates of assaults on inmates and staff, and a lack of transparency. Additionally, the prison healthcare system in Arizona is currently under a federal receivership order for failure to comply with a prior injunction.

Corrections officers and medical personnel in jails are considered first responders, said Michele Deitch, a former Texas prison monitor and director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas-Austin. When a jail consistently makes emergency calls for outside help, she added, it suggests that larger, systemic problems are likely going unaddressed.“If there's a crisis going on, whether it's a fight or a medical situation, they're supposed to have the people on-site to deal with that. It just seems odd to me that they need to reach outside the jail to have someone deal with an emergency,” Deitch noted.

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, has an expression for how immigration detention facilities in general operate now. “These are black holes,” she said.

“People who are chronically exhausted are more likely to struggle emotionally, physically and behaviorally,” Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab and co-author of the report, said in a news release. “If corrections leaders want safer and more stable facilities, finding ways to improve sleep conditions must become part of the conversation.”

AUSTIN, TX — A new report from the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab (PJIL) at The University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs reveals that chronic sleep disruption is a widespread and overlooked feature of incarceration in U.S. prisons and jails, with serious consequences for the physical and mental health of incarcerated people, institutional safety, and public health.