“The correctional environment needs to be used as a space for addressing the needs that people are walking into prison and jail with,” said Alycia Welch, associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the LBJ School.

The delays that families experience — whether in getting information, remains or property back — often can be traced back to policy gaps, said Alycia Welch, associate director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Welch helped lead a 50-state review of prison death policies and found that many agencies don’t clearly outline when families should be notified, what information can be shared, or who is responsible for doing it. Without those details, she noted, the default is for agencies to withhold information.“Families feel like they become the people that are being punished because their loved one was someone who was incarcerated,” she said. “They’re just trying to…honor their loved one.”

Nationally, states increasingly face legal challenges related to extreme temperatures in prisons, said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs. The most prominent example: Texas, where two-thirds of prison beds are not air-conditioned. A class-action lawsuit related to heat is pending and, Deitch said, a recent preliminary ruling sided with prisoners.

“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.”