Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Innovation Lab at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, played a key advisory role in the legislative deliberations that produced the Bland Act.
Instead of curtailing jailhouse deaths like Bland’s, she said, there’s been an “extraordinarily high number” and “the bottom line is that those deaths have gone uninvestigated, which is completely unacceptable and contrary to the statute.”
“Deaths in custody are an incredibly serious problem,” Deitch said. “A family has lost a loved one, a death has occurred in a facility that is responsible for keeping people safe and healthy. It creates a tremendous problem all around at a humanitarian level, at a financial level, at an operational level. So we all ought to care about what’s going on there.”