Rethinking American Jail Death Rates: A Comparison Of National Mortality And Jail Mortality, 1978, 1983

This article provides insights in to the problem of jail deaths in America by drawing upon relevant data from the 1978 and 1983 National Jail Censuses and other official sources. The goal o f the research is to compare national death trends with jail death trends in order to determine (1) if the problem is as grave as the available literature suggests, and (2) if any major changes have occurred as a result of federal court activism. Indeed, we found that when an adjusted general population death rate is employed certain cause‐specific rates are actually lower in jail. This generalization, while true for natural causes and homicides, was not the case for suicides. Depending upon which general population rates are compared with which jail rates, inmates committed suicide at a rate that was between five and fifteen times higher than the rate for free‐world citizens. Between censuses, the general trend in jail death rates was generally downward, although once again suicide rates tended to exhibit less of a decrease than the rates for homicides and death by natural causes. Possible explanations for this anomaly and policy implications are addressed in the article.