Sentenced to Death: Analyzing the Association between Jail Conditions and Deaths Behind Bars in Louisiana’s Jails

Abstract

Incarceration in the U.S. has long been recognized by mortality and criminology scholars as a driver of inequality in health outcomes. Scholars have studied the relationship between conditions of incarceration and mortality across prison conditions such as crowding, facility healthcare providers, and even temperature. Less, however, is known about how this relationship unfolds in jails. What little research does focus on the associations between jail conditions and in-custody mortality, nearly exclusively focuses on jails with large populations as a result of limited and often incomplete data on jail deaths. This quantitative study explores how jail turnover rate and crowding impact mortality in Louisiana’s jails using jail death records from 2015 to 2024 and facility data from the Census of Jails. It further analyzes whether those associations differ across jails with different population sizes. I find that turnover rate is positively associated with all-cause jail mortality, at the one-percent level, while crowding is negatively associated with all-cause mortality, at the five-percent level. When negative binomial regressions were repeated for small, medium, and large jails, separately, however, only mortality in small jails was significantly associated with turnover rate, and crowding was significantly associated with mortality only among large jails. Results further find that the share of the incarcerated pretrial population is positively associated with mortality and the share of incarcerated non-U.S. citizens is negatively associated with mortality, both significant at the one-percent level. These findings complicate previous research by demonstrating that associations between jail conditions and mortality vary significantly by jail size. Keywords: jail, mortality, crowding, turnover, conditions of incarceration