In a nation with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, imprisonment speeds the aging process, research shows. Some experts complain the federal government isn’t collecting or releasing data that could identify disease patterns and prevent deaths.
Pharmaceutical companies have put the brakes on many states’ ability to execute prisoners using lethal injections. Lacking alternatives, states are trying to keep the public from learning details about how they carry out executions.
More than 600,000 people are released from prisons every year, many with costly health conditions but no medications, medical records, a health care provider, or insurance.
More than 200 inmates killed themselves during eight years in which state prison officials failed to complete court-ordered suicide prevention safeguards. Inmates, the judge writes, have “waited far too long” for adequate mental health care.
The First Step Act was supposed to help free terminally ill and aging federal inmates who pose little or no threat to public safety. But while petitions for compassionate release skyrocketed during the pandemic, judges denied most requests.
An investigation of records from 25 county jails across Pennsylvania showed that nearly 1 in 3 “use of force” incidents by guards involved a confined person who was having a psychiatric crisis or who had a known mental illness.
Covid remains a threat for the roughly 30,000 people in the country’s network of immigration facilities. But ICE continues to flout its own pandemic protocols, an extension of the facilities’ poor history of medical care.
People in jails and prisons are particularly vulnerable to the fallout from the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Drug-related mortality rates have increased in prisons and jails even as the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses has dropped. The pandemic lockdowns on visitors didn’t eliminate the problem, showcasing that guards have been a source of the contraband.
A backlog at Montana’s psychiatric hospital for those facing criminal charges has left people with serious mental illness behind bars for months without adequate treatment. In some cases, judges have freed defendants over due-process violations.
