In July, 2016, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Baton Rouge to protest the death of Alton Sterling, a Black man who was shot by a police officer after being pinned to the ground outside a convenience store, where he had been selling compact disks. Although the protests were largely peaceful, officers in full riot gear dispersed the crowds and made more than a hundred and fifty arrests. A coalition of advocates, including the A.C.L.U. of Louisiana, filed a lawsuit accusing the Baton Rouge Police Department of infringing on the protesters’ First Amendment rights. A year later, Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, who had served as a legal observer during some of the protests, co-authored a report cataloguing degrading conditions at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a local jail where the demonstrators were detained. Protesters were crammed into filthy, overcrowded holding cells and denied water and toilet paper. Some were pepper-sprayed. Others were strip-searched in front of strangers. In multiple instances, injured protesters received no medical attention. The abuse did not result in any deaths, but the pattern of humiliation and coercion witnessed in the jail led Armstrong to wonder what happened when no legal observers were around.
In 2018, with support from the Promise of Justice Initiative, an advocacy organization based in New Orleans, Armstrong co-wrote another report, “Dying in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison,” which documented twenty-five deaths that had occurred in the facility between 2012 and 2016. The dead spanned several generations. Tyrin Colbert, a seventeen-year-old, was choked to death by a cellmate while crying out for help. Paul Cleveland, a Navy veteran in his seventies, died of severe heart problems, after staff allegedly left him naked on the floor of his cell; like many men described in the report, he suffered from an array of medical and mental-health issues. Nearly two-thirds of those who died were Black. Most strikingly, nearly ninety per cent of them—twenty-two men—had not been convicted of the charges that had led to their imprisonment. They were pretrial detainees, still awaiting their day in court—a situation that often happens because people cannot afford to post bail.
Louisiana, Armstrong’s home state, has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the country. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, it also has the highest in-custody mortality rate. But, when Armstrong began searching for more granular data to determine how many deaths were taking place in specific detention facilities, she couldn’t find anything. Like other states, Louisiana is supposed to report such data to the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance, but advocates complain that there are few repercussions for failing to comply, and the raw numbers gathered by the bureau are not made public. The bureau also does not consistently disaggregate state data by facility and by factors such as race and sex, making it easy to mask disparities.
Frustrated that no public database existed, Armstrong decided to create one, with the help of her law students at Loyola. Under her guidance, the students filed public-records requests with every jail, prison, and detention center in Louisiana. This past June, the database was unveiled, on a Web site called Incarceration Transparency, which features an interactive map of Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes (the state’s equivalent of counties). If a user clicks on a parish, the names of the correctional facilities within its borders appear, along with a list of people who have died in those facilities in recent years. Next to each entry are the person’s race and sex. There are links to documents related to each case, including the official death report that detention facilities in Louisiana fill out whenever someone dies in custody. The deaths have also been sorted by cause, such as suicide, accident, drugs, or violence.
How many of these deaths were preventable? How often were they preceded by neglect or even abuse? Armstrong believes that the first step to answering these questions is establishing transparency. Like the asphyxiation of George Floyd, in May, 2020, the shooting of Alton Sterling became known to the world thanks to bystanders who recorded what was happening. Most in-custody deaths occur inside institutions that are inaccessible to the public. “Their faces are hidden—deliberately so,” Armstrong told me. “The law shields them from the public gaze.”
Armstrong’s database enables citizens to see the human costs of America’s carceral system more clearly. It also draws attention to an issue that has largely been absent from contemporary discussions about criminal-justice reform, which, in liberal circles, have focussed on decreasing the number of people behind bars, either by reducing sentences or by abolishing prisons altogether. Armstrong’s work seeks to shift the focus to the dangerous, at times unconstitutional conditions inside the nation’s penal institutions, where more than two million people are confined. If we believe that the lives of incarcerated people matter, she maintains, we have a legal and moral obligation to make these conditions less inhumane.
The lethality of jails and prisons was underscored during the pandemic: according to JAMA, the infection rate for covid-19 was five times higher among state and federal prisoners than among the general population, and an incarcerated person with the virus was three times more likely to die than a non-incarcerated person who got infected. Some of the disparity can be attributed to the difficulty of containing a highly infectious airborne disease in densely crowded cellblocks. But Homer Venters, an epidemiologist and the former medical director of correctional health services in New York City, told me that a lack of concern for the safety and well-being of incarcerated people also played a role. Since the pandemic began, Venters has conducted on-site inspections of more than twenty-five jails and prisons across the country. Officials often assured him that they screened prisoners daily and adhered to the social-distancing guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control, but prisoners told him a different story, complaining that the bathrooms lacked soap and that symptomatic people who submitted sick-call requests were ignored. After four people died of COVID-19 at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, Venters concluded that a “grossly inadequate system of health care” had exacerbated the outbreak; his findings were cited this past March in a letter written by Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Dick Durbin, calling for the Department of Justice’s inspector general to conduct a review of all COVID-19 deaths in federal prisons.
COVID-19 fatalities are not yet included in Andrea Armstrong’s database. Deaths from heart attacks, respiratory diseases, and cancer feature prominently, however. The vast majority of the deaths listed in the database had medical causes. Some prison officials contend that these fatalities are unavoidable in institutions that house a disproportionate number of people with substance-abuse problems or such preëxisting conditions as diabetes. But Armstrong, who recently published a report that examined seven hundred and eighty-six deaths in Louisiana facilities between 2015 and 2019, told me, “Only fifty per cent of medical deaths we coded were from a preëxisting condition, which means fifty per cent of them were not.”
Louisiana has the highest number of people in the country who have been sentenced to life without parole, and many prisoners are dying from illnesses that they develop while serving time. Do they receive proper preventive care, as is their constitutional right? This past spring, Armstrong helped write a report on the quality of care dispensed to state prisoners, and presented it to members of the Louisiana legislature. It included interviews with physicians at hospitals and external clinics who stated that, by the time they saw incarcerated patients, little could be done for them. “I’ve seen way more cases of obvious advanced cancer than I think anyone should see,” one doctor said. “Horrible stories of young people with end-stage cancer that could have been treated.” The report included a reference to Lewis v. Cain, a 2015 class-action lawsuit filed by a dozen prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, alleging that the facility had denied them medical care. On March 31, 2021, Shelly Dick, a federal judge, affirmed this contention, in a ruling that cited numerous examples of blatantly deficient care. One case involved a prisoner, referred to as Patient No. 5, who complained for two years about abdominal pain. The discomfort eventually became so acute that the man couldn’t walk. When he was finally taken to a hospital, he was given a diagnosis of advanced colon cancer; shortly afterward, he died. Experts at the trial testified that the man’s death could have been prevented if the diagnosis had been made earlier. Judge Dick wrote in her opinion that Angola’s administrators had been “deliberately indifferent to the inmates’ serious medical needs in the means and manner of the delivery of healthcare,” violating the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
The ruling on deficient care at Angola resonated with Armstrong. In 2014, she attended a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by friends in New Orleans. Among the guests was Glenn Ford, who was eating his first Thanksgiving meal as a free man in three decades. Ford had spent twenty-nine years on death row at Angola for a murder that he did not commit. He had been released that March, after state prosecutors announced that “credible evidence” had emerged which exonerated him; they neglected to mention that exculpatory facts had been withheld from the all-white jury that convicted him, in 1984. “What are you doing for fun?” Armstrong asked Ford at the dinner. They struck up a friendship, attending jazz concerts at clubs in the French Quarter. But fifteen months after Ford’s release he died, of lung cancer. It was not, technically speaking, an in-custody death, but Armstrong told me Ford was convinced that his disease could have been treated had it been identified years earlier.
As Armstrong’s friendship with Ford indicates, her commitment to scholarly rigor does not mean that she remains aloof from the people her studies focus on. When I asked her who had most shaped her thinking about the penal system, she said, “People who are incarcerated.” The voices of people behind bars are often overlooked or discounted, even by critics of mass incarceration, to say nothing of élite law professors. But Armstrong, who is forty-six, grew up in New Orleans, near the juncture of Louisiana and Broad, a stretch of blocks lined with modest single-family homes. The neighborhood was stable, but many of the areas surrounding it, including the Magnolia Projects, a public-housing development a few blocks away, were not, particularly during the crack epidemic, which peaked during Armstrong’s childhood. “It was impossible to grow up as a Black girl in New Orleans in the nineteen-eighties and not know people who got arrested or were victims of crime,” she said. Armstrong credited her public-school teachers with steering her onto a safer path, as well as her mother, who imbued her with a belief in the value of community service, taking her to soup kitchens to volunteer with members of their church. Armstrong joined the Peace Corps after college and embarked on a career in international human rights, but she eventually decided that she wanted to do human-rights work closer to home. After graduating from Yale Law School, she returned to New Orleans, in 2008, where she clerked for a federal judge before joining the faculty of Loyola.
In person and in her scholarly work, Armstrong expresses her ideas in measured language that seems designed to appeal to people regardless of their backgrounds or their politics. When we met for lunch one day, at Café Reconcile, a soul-food restaurant, she suggested that exposing unconstitutional conditions in jails and prisons isn’t actually political. “It’s about government obligation,” she said. “We have an obligation to insure that justice is done and that every single person in that process is treated fairly and humanely. I don’t see that as a political idea.” But Armstrong also believes that the law has often been used to subordinate certain groups, Black people in particular. Although African Americans represent slightly less than a third of Louisiana’s population, they account for fifty-eight per cent of the eight hundred and thirty-four deaths behind bars that have been entered into Armstrong’s database thus far. “You can’t talk about incarceration without talking about race,” she said. Not infrequently, she noted, her race and gender were the only things that people she met seemed to notice about her. She once went to a courthouse in Baton Rouge to examine some records that she’d ordered, but was stopped at the entrance. “You’re not an attorney,” a white security guard insisted. “I am an attorney,” she calmly explained, showing him her bar card. “You don’t look like an attorney,” he snapped. Such attitudes have not stopped Armstrong from visiting prisons whenever she travels to new cities and asking to survey conditions inside. The walk-throughs were enlightening, she said, but they were so draining that she had learned to put nothing on her schedule the next day. “You’re basically walking around caged human beings in spaces smaller than the zoo, and sometimes interviewing them about their assault experiences,” she said.
Armstrong, who is single, has two daughters. John Adcock, a civil-rights attorney in New Orleans who has known Armstrong for sixteen years, pointed out to me that someone with her credentials could easily find a lucrative job at a white-shoe law firm. But Armstrong said, “For me, the work has to translate into service, or what’s the point of it?” She found exposing jail and prison conditions particularly urgent, because “the government has the most power it could possibly have in those settings, with people who have the least amount of rights.”
I recently drove to Baton Rouge to meet Linda Franks, who told me about the last time she saw her son, Lamar. It was May 26, 2015, and Lamar, who was twenty-seven at the time, with a round face and dreadlocks that spilled over his shoulders, had just got back together with his girlfriend, with whom he had a daughter. “He was glowing and smiling,” Franks recalled. Later that day, as he was on his way to pick up his grandmother, an officer stopped him for driving a car with overly tinted windows. According to video footage from the officer’s dash cam, Lamar was told that he was being taken into custody for an outstanding warrant from another parish, related to a five-hundred-dollar check that he had illegally cashed years earlier. The officer seemed almost apologetic, saying, “You’ve been honest with me since you stepped out of the car, and I respect that.”
Lamar was taken to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison and placed in one of the dorms, Q-8, where, in the common areas, nearly a hundred men were overseen by only one or two guards, even though violence was reportedly pervasive. Lamar was broad-shouldered and athletic, but he apparently began to feel unsafe upon entering the dorm. According to various witnesses, he started talking loudly to himself and acting paranoid; it is possible that he’d ingested synthetic marijuana, which was widely available in the jail. Eventually he told a guard on duty that he needed to get out of Q-8. The guard ordered him to return to his cell and, when he refused, charged him with “aggravated disobedience.” Two prisoners later testified that the aggression came not from Lamar but from a group of guards, whom they saw beating and pepper-spraying him. (The jail has denied these allegations.)
According to a lawsuit filed by the family, no mental-health assessment was performed on Lamar, even though he was clearly distraught; instead, he was transferred to solitary confinement. Linda Franks called the jail every few hours, trying to get some information. During one of those calls, a week after Lamar was pulled over, she was informed that he had been taken to the hospital after an accident. She recalls yelling into the phone, “Excuse me, what accident? That’s my child, and he’s in there for a traffic ticket!” Franks later learned that her son, who had no history of mental illness, had hanged himself in a cell that was supposed to be regularly monitored. Lamar was in the neural I.C.U., and soon died. A warden callously told Linda’s husband, Karl, “It is what it is—your son killed himself.” David Utter, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit, told me, “The official cause of death was suicide, but there’s no question in my mind that the jail killed him.”
Lamar’s death was one of the twenty-five detailed in the 2018 report on the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison that Andrea Armstrong co-authored. Armstrong told me that officials at the jail responded to her findings by claiming that it simply held a lot of sick and mentally ill people. But the figures in her database showed that several jails in Louisiana had no deaths between 2015 and 2019. Armstrong called the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison “one of the deadliest jails in the country.” On June 10, 2021, a forty-year-old detainee at the facility, Saul Diaz, died of suicide—the forty-sixth death that she has documented there since 2012. (A jail representative told me that people on suicide watch are regularly monitored, and that “deaths due to violence” are not a problem.)
It turns out that there is even less documentation about local jails, and what takes place in them, than there is about state or federal prisons. “We know absolutely nothing about jails,” Michele Deitch, an expert on correctional oversight at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “They are places so intimately connected to our communities, and we don’t have a clue what’s going on in them.” Armstrong said that, when she first began writing about the conditions of incarceration, she focussed on prisons, but, after conducting research on the jail in Baton Rouge, she began to see the two types of institution as cogs in an “interlocking system.” The dynamic is especially striking in Louisiana, which, in the mid-nineties, responded to a federal court order to reduce overcrowding in its prisons by enlisting the state’s sheriffs, who run the parish jails, to take on the excess population. Today, nearly half of Louisiana’s prison population is held in these jails, which receive $26.39 per day for each state prisoner they house—enough money to give sheriffs in rural parishes an incentive to admit new people, but not nearly enough to provide quality medical and mental-health services, much less rehabilitative programs. As bad as conditions are in state prisons like Angola, they’re even worse in parish jails, Armstrong told me, “because, in general, jails have fewer resources.”
The absence of transparency is one reason that the stories of people who die in jails rarely make headlines. Jasmine Heiss, a project director at the Vera Institute of Justice, offered me another reason: the families of victims are usually too poor to “hire a lawyer to figure out how to hold the system accountable.” When I visited Linda Franks in Baton Rouge, she told me that even people who do have the means are often reluctant to demand answers, because of the stigma associated with having had a family member die behind bars. “They bank on the fact that I’m going to be ashamed to say that my son died in jail, so I’m not going to tell anybody what really happened—I’m going to keep it quiet,” she told me, while sitting in the hair salon that she owns, a small room with mustard-colored walls on the second floor of a shopping plaza. Several women on hand nodded. Since Lamar’s death, Franks had turned the salon into a gathering place for members of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a grassroots organization fighting to change conditions in the jail. Franks set out a tray of fresh fruit and passed around a box of tissues as people began to share their stories. Among them was Vanessa Fano, whose brother, Jonathan, was booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison after experiencing a psychotic episode. He spent ninety-four days there—ninety-two of them in solitary confinement—before dying of suicide.
The Reverend Alexis Anderson, a minister in Baton Rouge and a member of the coalition, told me, “If it weren’t for criminalizing poverty and criminalizing mental illness, a lot of these deaths wouldn’t happen.” In her view, people whose loved ones have died in confinement should be seen in the same light as those whose loved ones have been murdered by gangs or shot by the police. “They’re crime victims,” she said. “And they should have what happened to them acknowledged as a crime.”
According to Armstrong’s database, in-custody homicides appear to be relatively rare. Just twelve deaths from violence were documented in Louisiana’s penal system between 2015 and 2019: six in parish jails, six in state penitentiaries. But Armstrong cautions that the accuracy of homicide statistics is open to question, since correctional officials have a strong incentive to cover up these deaths, not least to avoid liability. “Some deaths are coded as medical even though they are due, for example, to blunt-force trauma to the head,” she said. “All the data is subject to bias and coding errors made by the facilities.” (A representative of the Louisiana Department of Corrections vehemently denied that officials falsify data.)
Steve J. Martin, a lawyer and a corrections consultant in Oklahoma, has spent several decades investigating fatalities in correctional facilities that resulted from the staff’s use of unnecessary and excessive force. He told me that one consistent thread in the cases he has examined is obfuscation and denial. Martin, who is the federal court monitor at the New York City Department of Corrections and has reviewed cases in more than three dozen states, said, “It is rare that the subject agency will ever acknowledge fault or blame related to an in-custody death from staff use of force. And there are so many avenues for the subject officers to distort and deny.” Often, the problem is compounded by local medical examiners, who have personal relationships with sheriffs and jail administrators. In one case that Martin recalled, security guards repeatedly Tasered a prisoner, causing a heart attack. “That death was recorded as a cardiac arrest,” Martin said. “It was a homicide.” In another case, a homeless man booked into the Twin Towers jail in Los Angeles was placed in four-point restraints, even though he had not behaved violently, and was then asphyxiated by a group of guards who kneeled on his throat and torso. “They choked him to death, plain and simple, not unlike in the George Floyd case,” Martin said. Yet an internal investigation by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department concluded that the officers had not acted improperly, since none of them had kicked or punched the victim.