U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, September 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. Credit – Kevin Dietsch—Getty Images
The Justice Department has counted nearly 1,000 deaths in jails, jails or during arrests in the past fiscal year, according to the results of a nearly a year-long two-pronged investigation.
The 10-month investigation, detailed in a Sept. 20 report released jointly by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation and the Government Accountability Office, focused on whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) complied with the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA) of 2013. DCRA requires the department to collect data from states on prison and prison deaths and submit to Congress a report that analyzes that data to propose solutions to reduce such deaths. The investigation found that the DOJ missed the deaths in custody of 990 people in fiscal year 2021, the DOJ’s record retention has been disorderly since 2016, and the report it must submit to Congress will not be complete until 2024. – eight years after the expiry date.
In addition, much of the data that DOJ has collected is incomplete, the study found. 70% of the data DOJ does have is missing at least one required set of information — for example, race, ethnicity, age, or gender — and 40% is missing a description of the circumstances of the victim’s death. After a Senate hearing on the matter on Tuesday, Subcommittee Chairman Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, did not say whether the DOJ would face any consequences for failing to comply with the law. He told TIME that “step one is pursuing the facts and the truth. Such a hearing is part of the accountability process.”
“We believe that collecting data on deaths in custody is a noble and necessary step towards a transparent and legitimate justice system,” Maureen Henneberg, the DOJ officer who directs the accounting of deaths in custody, told the report. hearing to senators. “As I know this commission appreciates, it is a major undertaking to collect this information from 56 states and territories, which in turn rely on reports from thousands of prisons, local jails and law enforcement agencies. But we are convinced that it is more than worth it.” In 2020, according to the most recent data available from the DOJ, approximately 1.5 million people were incarcerated in state and local facilities in the U.S.
“We’re talking about a fairly manageable amount of information here,” Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, told Henneberg. “You have failed completely. I mean, literally, you’ve totally failed.”
Relatives of two men who died in prisons in Louisiana and Georgia also testified. Ossoff played an excerpt of a phone conversation between Belinda Maley and her son Matthew Loflin, who died in 2014 from heart failure at the Chatham County Detention Center in Georgia. In the clip, Loflin can be heard telling his mother: “I have coughed up blood and my feet are swollen. It hurts, Mom… I’m going to die here.” Maley, a witness at the hearing, was visibly shocked by the length of the clip.
“I’ve lost all my voicemails from him,” Maley said, “so the shock of listening to his voice again, in the worst possible way, is just too much.”
Read more: Inside the Fight to Change Baltimore Police Department One Year After Freddie Gray’s Death
DOJ argues that the gaps have arisen as a result of changes in the reporting process over the past decade. DCRA was first approved in 2000 and later re-authorized in 2013 with additional provisions. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BSJ) was previously tasked with collecting this data and did so successfully in reports that were made public. But the newer version of DCRA linked certain grant funding for states to their compliance in providing full data on deaths in custody to the DOJ. During the hearing, Henneberg told the senators that linking the data collection to the grant funding created two problems: it discouraged states from providing full data so as not to risk losing state funding, and because BJS, a neutral data collection arm of the DOJ, cannot could be involved in a program that imposed fines, DOJ had to transfer the data collection to the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) in 2016. correct data collection on deaths in custody.
“The current process deserves to be re-evaluated,” Henneberg said. “As a federal statistical office, the BJS is prohibited from using its data for any purpose other than statistics or research. While DCRA of 2013 was well-intentioned, it had unintended negative consequences.”
Johnson acknowledged that both Congress and the bureaucracy could play a role in creating a flawed data collection process, but said these problems could have been solved if the two data collection arms had simply coordinated efforts. Ossoff added that there was early evidence that the BJA was not collecting its data properly, but the DOJ did nothing about it.
“[DOJ is] failing to fulfill their legal obligation,” Ossoff told reporters after the hearing. “Because we conducted this investigation, because we shed light on this failure… they say now, eight years after that law was enacted, they cannot successfully implement it.”
Before the hearing ended, Vanessa Fano, whose brother Jonathan Fano died by suicide in Louisiana’s East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in 2017, bemoaned the trust her family had placed in the system. “Consistently, we were told to do things a certain way and things were going well,” Fano said. “Had we been given the information about how terrible the conditions are in that facility and how few are actually getting adequate care, we would have pushed for a different outcome.”
Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University who researches and maintains a database of deaths in custody in Louisiana, told senators that stories like Fano and Maley’s are why the federal government must have accurate records. “Deaths in custody can point to broader challenges in an institution,” she said. “It is impossible to fix what is invisible.”
