An alarming number of deaths in custody have made headlines in Pennsylvania this year–by our count at least 13 people have died, 6 in state prisons and 7 in county jails.
We say “at least” because we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Only a fraction of deaths make the news, and jails often exploit legal loopholes to avoid their responsibility to report them at all. As a result, even official government tallies of deaths in custody are an underestimate.
But even the imperfect information we do have confirms the sense that more people are dying behind bars. According to the Prison Society’s analysis of state data, the rate of deaths in Pennsylvania county jails increased 60% between 2015 and 2023. In state prisons, the death rate has come down after spiking during the pandemic, but was still up 17% from 2015.
“What's even more alarming is we're not just seeing increases in the rate of death, we're seeing increases in preventable deaths–those related to mental health, to drugs, and to violence,” said Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans who researches prison and jail deaths nationally.
News reports about the recent Pennsylvania deaths frequently implicated those three factors.
In Philadelphia on March 9, Andrew Drury was found dead in a jail intake cell 36 hours after arriving. Drury, 42, struggled with opioid addiction and had suffered a heart attack during a previous jail stay while going through withdrawal. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that six hours before his death, jail staff determined that his condition was an “emergency” requiring one-on-one supervision, yet he remained in the holding cell.
Four days later, Forest Micha Touchberry, 31, died by suicide in a cell where he was housed alone at the Lehigh County Jail. It was the jail’s second suicide death this year, and the third in the last 8 months. Touchberry had been on probation for possession of a controlled substance, and was put in jail only a week before he died.
In two different state prisons, incarcerated people died violent deaths. On January 29, Spencer Kassel, 35, died after an assault by another incarcerated person at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Camp Hill. His death came two weeks after Manuel Morales, 66, was killed in a fight at SCI Dallas.
“Jails and prisons have a core obligation that they have to perform, which is the safe and secure housing of people involuntarily,” Armstrong said. “And if they can't, for example, prevent serious violence from occurring,” she said, “then what else can't they do?”
Armstrong said that the staffing shortages brought on by COVID may be one cause of the increase in deaths.
“There is less programming, less visitation, less out-of-cell time for people, all of which might contribute to causes of death, including suicides, including violence, drug related deaths, and even medical related deaths, where people aren't getting the type of exercise or outdoor access that they would have before COVID,” she said.
The need for a minimum level of transparency
Even as prison and jail deaths accelerate, we don’t know the full extent of the increase. The federal government has failed to effectively enforce a federal law requiring local and state governments to report deaths in custody. The system that exists now depends on self-reporting by local jurisdictions, who often manipulate their numbers by legally releasing people from custody before they die in the hospital. Investigative reporting by Joshua Vaughn at Pennlive and Brittany Hailer at the Pittsburgh Institute of Nonprofit Journalism uncovered 25 deaths in county jails that went unreported in 2022.
Pennsylvania legislators are considering a bill that would help ensure that deaths in custody are accurately counted. Senate Bill 996 would require local jurisdictions to report deaths in custody to the attorney general within 30 days or face penalties of $1,000 per day and misdemeanor criminal charges. It would also require them to report deaths that occur in the hospital within three days of being released from custody, helping to close the legal loophole counties exploit to undercount deaths.
Accurate reporting and tracking of data would bring a minimum level of transparency around deaths in jail.
“If we don't understand the circumstances in which those deaths are occurring and the patterns that we are able to observe amongst deaths, then we won't be able to prevent future ones,” Armstrong said.
Emerson Waite, the Prison Society’s Research and Data Manager, contributed research to this story.