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Jail deaths have dropped by a third in Los Angeles

From the LA Times this morning:

Three inmates died in Los Angeles County jails in just over a week

Three Los Angeles County inmates died in an nine-day period this month, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a grim milestone.

....To people paying close attention to the county’s lockups, the cluster of deaths did not come as a surprise. “Because the jails are operating 20% over capacity, we’re going to continue to see people dying,” said Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Here's the 8th paragraph:

Los Angeles jails are on track to see fewer deaths this year than last, though incomplete information makes it difficult to draw conclusions about why. Seven people have died behind bars this year; records show the jails had seen 11 deaths by this point last year.

To people who pay even passing attention to statistics, the cluster of deaths also did not come as a surprise. That's just how random events happen. The real question here is why the LA Times tried to imply in its headline that jail deaths were up when, in fact, they're down 37% so far this year.

7 thoughts on “Jail deaths have dropped by a third in Los Angeles

  1. Joel

    The real question here is why you think there's any question here. If it bleeds, it leads. That's the business model.

  2. kaleberg

    Maybe it's because the folks at the LA Times would like to see the number of jail deaths go to zero. Maybe it's because there are still problems in the jails that could continue to kill people and really need to be addressed. Maybe because a 37% decrease with a very small statistical N means that just a bit more pressure to keep things improving could eliminate jail deaths almost completely. Maybe it's because clusters of deaths offer an opportunity to identify causes and work towards solutions.

    I get the impression that there are lots of good reasons.

    1. Austin

      This. If the N = 11 for deaths last year, then the change in deaths to N = 7 this year isn't a big deal. Normal variation year to year probably has deaths swinging from 6 to 16 to 8 to whatever. There's no indication that N = 11 is the average or median in the data set of "how many people did LA let die in prison?"

      The question still remains though: why is LA allowing anyone to die in prison? These are all people allegedly without access to weapons and placed under 24/7/365 watch to make sure they don't escape - are they not also watching to make sure they don't kill each other or kill themselves? Other countries - and even places in the US - manage to run their prisons with N = 0 for years or even decades. Why can't LA?

      1. KenSchulz

        Do you have actual data for this? We incarcerate a lot of people; statistically, some fraction will die of various causes while in custody. What a reasonable person wants to know is, is the death rate significantly higher than for an equivalent group not in custody? The prison population is poorer and more likely substance-abusive than the general population; in the US, poverty correlates with poorer health.

  3. jte21

    In the very next paragraph the story acknowledges, rather obliquely, within another quote, that it in fact represents a decline. The lede, however, is not just the deaths but the fact that one of the three who died was apparently being held because he couldn't make bail, and that several other deaths over the past couple of years have also been of inmates who hadn't been charged yet, but were still in lockup because they couldn't afford bail. So it's really a story about bail reform, which of course is one of the great political hot potatoes of our day.

  4. Austin

    Sometimes I really think the solution to so many problems with the delivery of governmental services in America is that we should just hire foreign countries to run all of them. Hire the Japanese government to build and run our railroads. Hire a Scandinavian government to run our prisons. Hire basically any developed country's government to run our police forces. Americans seem simply unable to provide decent governmental services at scale to millions of people at affordable prices.

  5. Jimm

    As always, good points, but a year-to-year comparison of a statistical measure with 18 total points isn't significant, so the fact that 3 died in the same week, considering the very small number of deaths over a much larger number of weeks, is noteworthy/news.

    To me, the more important caveat to have given is that over the past few years we only have an inmate die about every 4-5 weeks, so one particular week where they're bundled up is kind of like someone going on a successful craps run, worth mentioning but not significant unless a further pattern develops.

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