“In the absence of any kinds of checks and balances on the jail, or some kind of external oversight, then the only thing you’ve got is the courts,” said Michele Deitch, a distinguished senior lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin who runs the National Resource Center for Correctional Oversight. “That’s why it’s come to this.”

“I think it's really important that the agencies are talking to each other, that there's an emphasis in the strategic plan on trying to develop those relationships and understand how each of them works and the respective responsibilities of different bodies,” said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. “So, all of that, I think, is good and it takes time.” Deitch runs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, which has hosted conferences on issues like deaths in custody, and helms an online resource documenting prison oversight in states across the U.S.

“If you want to figure out which population to target where it doesn’t have a public safety implication, this is the population to turn to,” Michele Deitch, one of the report’s authors and the director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, told Stateline. “This is an issue that can gather bipartisan support.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs released Trapped in Time: The Silent Crisis of Elderly Incarceration today, a report exposing how U.S. prisons are failing to keep up with the rising number of aging people behind bars. Outdated sentencing laws have left tens of thousands of people imprisoned for decades, creating a humanitarian, fiscal, and operational crisis as correctional departments struggle to meet the medical, mental health, and accessibility needs of an aging prison population.

KTOO could confirm only that most states have internal affairs units. But Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab in Texas, said Williams was right — Alaska is the only state she knows of that doesn’t have internal investigation mechanisms.

“You simply can't operate a safe facility with that many staff positions left vacant,” Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Houston Chronicle. “Supervision checks are left undone; staff don't want to intervene in incidents because there is no backup; and lockdowns are more frequent because staff are not available to take people to programs.”

“The dashboard reveals a very troubling trend of increasing numbers of suicides, which should lead corrections administrators to dig deeply into the reasons for the rise and to propose strategies for preventing and reducing the number of deaths,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. “By making this data visible to the public, CANY is providing a window not only into conditions behind bars, but also into the hopelessness, despair, and trauma experienced by many of those incarcerated in New York’s prisons,” she added.

“He’s entitled to medical care to meet his serious medical needs. That’s the standard,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas and an expert on prison conditions. “It’s not a lesser standard of care because he’s incarcerated.” Deitch, who has not reviewed Pizutelli’s medical records, called him “a challenging case.” “The question is, really, what is it accomplishing putting someone like that inside and putting them in prison?” she said.

Michele Dietch is a senior lecturer at UT and the director of the LBJ School Prison Innovation Lab. In this interview, Michele discusses the importance of transparency in the carceral system. In November of 2020, Michele, with the help of UT LBJ students, published a report documenting COVID-19 deaths in Texas prisons and juvenile facilities. She goes on to speak about the harms of pretending that prisons are isolated and separated from the rest of society, and how in the case of a pandemic, it can increase spread and impact a community's safety. Michele believes that the opaqueness of Texas prisons is protecting negligence and abuse within the prison walls and she calls for policy makers and prison officials to become more transparent. Michele also discusses her journey into incarcerated rights advocacy and how she continues to show up and care for her community through research and data-driven revelations. This interview was conducted via Zoom on April 9, 2021with interviewers Murphy Anne Carter and Brooken Jones and narrator Michele Dietch.

Laura A. Bischoff Columbus Dispatch