A Fight to Expose the Hidden Human Costs of Incarceration
The New Yorker, August 16, 2021: A Fight to Expose the Hidden Human Costs of Incarceration
“In 2018, with support from the Promise of Justice Initiative, an advocacy organization based in New Orleans, Andrea 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.”
Additional reading:
Andrea Craig Armstrong, The Missing Link: Jail and Prison Conditions in Criminal Justice Reform, 80 La. L. Rev. (2020)
Prison Policy Initiative, June 8, 2021: New data: State prisons are increasingly deadly places
