While suicides are prevalent in jails and prisons, they are entirely preventable, according to Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Deitch noted that incarcerated people have access only to the materials that are given to them by staff and only have the privacy allowed by staff. The sheets both Marlow and Campbell used were provided by the prison and both died while under constant camera observation. “[Incarcerated people are] under the control of staff in a tightly controlled environment where they shouldn’t have access to the tools that they use to kill themselves,” she said. “They shouldn’t have the means. They shouldn’t have the opportunity. So, it is absolutely a preventable form of death.”

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, says she hasn’t seen another jail-based group in Texas take such an individualized approach to cases. There is very little public oversight of jails, including levels of capacity and who’s incarcerated, she says. “This is a really smart, much needed approach,” Deitch says. “Without that, it is so hard to keep all the different players on track.” The impact goes beyond taxpayer dollars. “Peoples’ lives are deeply, deeply affected by the experience of incarceration,” she says. “Many of them experience trauma that ends up affecting their lives after release as well. And it actually sends a lot of people into poverty.”

Michele Deitch, a leading criminal justice expert who directs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, said the state could do more to address the issue: have the Texas Commission on Jail Standards implement a requirement that jails release inmates when they’ve completed their sentence. The Fourteenth Amendment bans the government from taking away a person’s freedom unfairly and arbitrarily. Having a standard would spell out what this constitutional right means to jails and what steps they need to take to avoid overdetention, instead of facing lawsuits after the harm has happened, according to Deitch. “It’s more preventative,” she said.

“Washington is very much in the minority here” in its lack of oversight of jails, said Michele Deitch, an incarceration oversight expert who directs the University of Texas Prison and Jail Innovation Lab.

“It’s really missing the point of these investigations … which is to find out what happened inside this very closed environment,” said Michele Deitch, who directs the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs. “What was going on there that this person died?”

The 2025 “Prison Journalist of the Year” says Black history is the foundation her work is built upon.

JW: Yes, we plan on pursuing this. When we spoke to an expert at the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab from the University of Texas who said three deaths at any correctional facility is alarming, and three homicides in alarming in that period of time.

“Kudos to the jail commission for doing the right thing,” said Michele Deitch, a University of Texas law professor who served as an expert consultant on the Sandra Bland Act. “But if they hadn’t done so, the public would be in the dark regarding these deaths.”

Over the nearly two decades spanning 2001 to 2019, Kentucky recorded just six homicides in its state-run prisons, according to federal data.

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, said based on her experience “that is unusual. Natural deaths in custody usually account for the vast majority of deaths.” She also said the sizable number of suicides in Hawaiʻi prisons is unusual because suicide is usually far more common in jails than in prisons.