This article was originally on KFF Health News.
After spending 38 years in Alabama’s prison system, one of the most violent and busiest in the country, Larry Jordan was lucky enough to live long enough to regain his freedom.
The decorated Vietnam War veteran had survived prostate cancer and hepatitis C behind bars when a judge released him early late last year.
“I never gave up hope,” says Jordan, 74, who lives in Alabama. “I know a lot of people in prison who did.”
At least 6,182 people died in state and federal prisons in 2020, a 46% increase from the previous year, according to data recently released by researchers from the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project.
“During the pandemic, many prison sentences became death sentences,” said Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that researches and analyzes data about the criminal justice system.
Now Jordan is worried about his longevity. He struggles with pain in his legs and feet caused by a potentially life-threatening vascular blockage, and research suggests prison accelerates the aging process.
In the United States, life expectancy will drop in 2021 for the second year in a row, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That drop is linked to the devastating effect of Covid-19 and a spike in drug overdoses.
Some academic experts and activists said the trend also underlines the lasting health consequences of mass incarceration in a country with about 2 million inmates or inmates, one of the highest rates in the developed world.
A Senate report last year found the U.S. Justice Department unable to identify more than 900 dead in jails and local jails in fiscal year 2021. The DOJ’s poor data collection and reporting undermined transparency and congressional oversight of deaths in custody, according to the report.
Thousands of people like Jordan are released each year from prisons and prisons with conditions such as cancer, heart disease and infectious diseases they acquired during their incarceration. The issue is hitting hard in Alabama, Louisiana and other southeastern states, which have some of the highest incarceration rates in the country.
An important reason the US follows other developed countries in life expectancy because more people are behind bars and keeps them there much longersaid Chris Wildeman, a sociology professor at Duke University who has researched the link between criminal justice and life expectancy.
“It’s a burden on the health of the population,” Wildeman said. “The worse the prison conditions, the more likely that incarceration is linked to excess mortality.”
Mass incarceration has a ripple effect throughout society.
Trapped people may be more sensitive than the general population to infectious diseases such as covid and HIV that can spread to loved ones and other members of the community once released. The federal government has also failed to collect or release enough information about deaths in custody that could be used to identify patterns of illness and prevent deaths and illness inside and outside institutions, researchers said.
Over a 40-year period beginning in the 1980s, the number of people in the country’s prisons and jails more than quadrupled, fueled by hard-on crime policies and the war on drugs.
Federal legislators and states like Alabama implemented reforms in recent years bipartisan agreement that prison costs have become too high and that some people could released without posing a risk to public safety.
The changes have come too late and not gone far enough to curb the worst health impacts, some researchers and activists for reform said.
Yet no one has proven that incarceration alone shortens life expectancy. But research from the early 2000s showed that it did the death rate for people leaving prison was 3.5 times higher than for the rest of the population in the first years after release. Experts found that the number of deaths from drug use, violence and lack of access to health care was particularly high in the first two weeks after release.
Another study found that black people currently or formerly incarcerated suffered a 65% higher death rate than their non-black peers. Black people also form one disproportionately high percentage of state prison populations.
The enactment in 2000 of the Death in Custody Reporting Act, and its reauthorization in 2014, required the DOJ to collect information on deaths in state and local prisons and prisons.
The information is believed to include details about the time and location of a death, demographics about the deceased, the agency involved, and the manner of death.
But a recent report from the Government Accountability Office found that 70% of the documents the DOJ received were is missing at least one required data point. Federal officials also lacked a plan to take corrective action against states that failed to meet reporting requirements, the GAO found.
The lack of data means the federal government can’t say definitively how many people have died in prisons and prisons since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, researchers said.
“Without data, we operate in the dark,” said Andrea Armstrong, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law who has testified before Congress about the issue.
Armstrong said federal and state officials need the data to identify institutions that are not providing proper health care, nutritious food or other services that could save lives.
The DOJ did not make officials available for interviews to answer questions about the GAO report.
In a written statement, agency officials said they were working with law enforcement and government officials to overcome barriers to full and accurate reporting.
“The Department of Justice recognizes the great importance of reducing deaths in custody,” the statement said. “Complete and accurate data are essential for drawing meaningful conclusions about factors that may contribute to unnecessary or premature deaths, and promising practices and policies that can reduce deaths.”
Department officials said the agency is committed to improving implementation of the Death in Custody Reporting Act and has stepped up efforts to improve the quality and quantity of the data it collects.
The DOJ has accused Alabama, where Jordan was imprisoned not adequately protecting detainees of violence, sexual abuse and excessive force by prison staff, and of detainees being held in unsanitary and unsafe conditions.
Jordan was serving 38 years of a 40-year sentence for reckless murder resulting from a car accident, which his attorney said in his parole application was one of the longest sentences in Alabama history for the crime. A jury had found him guilty of drunken driving while driving a vehicle that crashed into another and killed a man. Instead, if convicted today, he would be eligible for a sentence of just 13 years behind bars because he has no previous history of felonies, wrote Alabama Circuit Judge Stephen Wallace, who accepted Jordan’s petition for early release. rated.
With legal help from Redemption earnedan Alabama nonprofit led by a former Supreme Court Chief Justice, Jordan has filed a petition in court for early release.
On September 26, 2022, Wallace signed an order to release Jordan from prison under the rule that allows Alabama courts to reconsider verdicts.
A few months later, Jordan said, he had surgery to treat a vascular blockage that reduced blood flow to his left leg and left foot. One photo shows a long surgical scar extending from his thigh to near his ankle.
The Alabama Department of Corrections declined an interview request to answer questions about conditions in the state’s prisons.
Jordan said his vascular condition was excruciating. He said he didn’t get adequate treatment for it in prison: “You could see my foot die.”
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