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.

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas, said deaths like Pope’s raise broader questions about whether prison systems are identifying people in crisis, supervising them properly, and keeping them out of conditions that can make suicide more likely. Prison suicides, she said, can reflect failures related to supervision, suicide-prevention protocols and housing decisions, especially when vulnerable people are placed in isolation or left with the means to harm themselves. “If there’s one obligation that prisons have, it’s keeping the people inside safe and alive,” Deitch said. “These are not people who were sent to prison to die.” There are many reasons why young inmates are dying, Deitch said. Her decades of studying prisons have taught her that most suicides are preventable. “It could also be that people feel really threatened in that environment, and they would rather take their lives than face whatever they’re going to face,” she added.

“Alabama is absolutely an outlier,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. “It is, by far, the worst system in the country to the extent that we are aware of that sort of thing. The violence levels are completely out of control. Every system is going to have some level of violence for sure, but this is on a scale that is not like anywhere else in the country.”

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?”

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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.