Laura A. Bischoff Columbus Dispatch

The Examiner reported in October that 20 states had an independent prison oversight body. Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, wrote about independent oversight in an essay published by the Brennan Center in 2021. “They can identify troubling practices early, and bring these concerns to administrators’ attention for remediation before the problems turn into scandals, lawsuits, or deaths,” Deitch wrote. “They can share best practices and strategies that have worked in other facilities to encourage a culture of improvement.”

“There is no question that all of those factors—the understaffing, the lack of security rounds, the overcrowding—all of that is going to lead to security issues that led to the escape,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. “You just don’t see things like this,” she added.

When people inside die from supposed natural causes, it’s often because facilities don’t provide necessary health care, said Michele Deitch, the director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. “When officials use the term ‘natural death,’ it’s meant to suggest that we don’t have to dig any deeper. But that’s not accurate at all. A lot of so-called natural deaths are very preventable.” Deitch’s lab analyzes public data on in-custody deaths and conducts studies on the information available. For example, she has highlighted how jail officials could help prevent drug-related deaths with a more diligent staffing process. “I’ve seen how some agencies make staff go through screening technology to stop the drugs from coming in,” she noted.

Michele Deitch, who directs the LBJ School’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, said Senate Bill 1727 concerns her. “It would transfer more youth from the juvenile system to adult prisons in Texas. And that’s really concerning,” she said. “These are young kids. We’re talking 15, 16 year olds who could end up in adult prison.”

The missing minutes in the footage are essential for outside investigators to get a complete understanding of what happened in Bonner’s case, according to Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin. “In order to have a full appreciation of the circumstances surrounding a death in custody, it is critical to know everything that happened in the minutes leading up to that death,” she said in an email exchange. “For example, did anyone have physical contact with the person who died? Was she calling out for assistance? Did anyone pass by her cell and see her in distress?”

Citing the Trump DOJ cuts and executive orders, Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, urged state lawmakers throughout the country to take action. “As these critical vehicles for federal oversight of prisons and jails fall, there has never been a more urgent time to push for stronger oversight at the state level.”

“There has definitely been a resurgence of tough-on-crime legislation across the US and in Texas,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “Legislators always get a lot of political mileage out of filing these bills.”

MICHELE DEITCH: It would be an absolutely Kafkaesque situation where the family has no idea where the person is, what kind of conditions they're being held in, whether they're even alive.

“The whole intent of the provision in the Sandra Bland Act was to ensure that it was an independent, unbiased, objective investigation, something that the public could trust, that policymakers could trust, that it isn’t self-interested the way it would be if it’s an agency investigating itself,” said Michele Deitch, the director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at UT Austin and a consultant on the bill.