Earlier this month, Vermont media outlets reported that the Vermont State Police were investigating the death of a recent incarcerated person at Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield.
Dennis Mayotte, 37, of North Springfield, was the 11th incarcerated person to die in Vermont so far in 2023.
The Department of Corrections informed VSP died of an apparent suicide. According to Vermont Public, DOC staff tried life-saving measures while awaiting the arrival of emergency medical personnel, who later pronounced Mayotte deceased at the scene. Police said Mayotte’s death did not appear to be suspicious, but an investigation is ongoing
Jessica Adler, an associate professor of history at Florida International University, has been looking at the state of the nation’s prison system. Her work continues “to focus on governmental involvement in health care in her current projects, which examine the history of medical services in U.S. prisons and late twentieth century transformations in the veterans’ health program,” according to the school’s website.
Adler and her colleague, Weiwei Chen, recently published a paper on escalating jail mortality rates nationwide.
In an article published in the June 2023 issue of Health Affairs, they examined relationships between jail conditions and jail deaths, analyzing factors such as percent of jail capacity occupied, admission and discharge rates and population demographics, according to a recent commentary in The Conversation.
Among the variables that appeared to be most significantly related to jail mortality were turnover rate — the number of people admitted to and discharged from a facility relative to its average population — as well as the percentage of Black people in the jail population, the article states.
According to Adler and Chen, “Jails are sometimes referred to as the ‘front door’ of the criminal justice system. Unlike prisons, which are run by federal and state governments and hold convicted people serving relatively long sentences, jails are locally managed, and the majority of their populations are being detained pretrial while unconvicted.”
Data on how many people die while incarcerated is notoriously inaccessible and often unreliable. Still, available reports on jail deaths from the Bureau of Justice Statistics offer some perspective, they said.
In 2019, overall jail death rates were below the adjusted national average of 339 per 100,000, but leading up to that year, they had steeply increased. Between 2000 and 2019, jail mortality rose by 11%, from 151 per 100,000 to 167 per 100,000, according to their research.
To find more information, the pair turned to statistics compiled by Reuters news agency reporters, who submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain mortality data from the largest jails across the United States.
“Our data on jail conditions — such as annual admissions and releases, facility capacities and demographics — came from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ census and annual survey of jails,” Adler wrote.
“Some of our most robust findings about jail deaths had to do with two factors: turnover rate — the sum of weekly admissions and releases divided by average daily population — and demographics.
In the jails we examined, average turnover was 67% (slightly above the national average of 53%). Relatively high turnover rates, we found, were associated with higher death rates overall, as well as due to suicide, drugs and alcohol, and homicide,” she wrote.
In addition, Adler and Chen said their findings about both turnover and racial disparities “should be considered alongside the broader context of jail incarceration in the United States.”
Roughly 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed each year, some of them multiple times. Overall, there were approximately 10.3 million admissions to more than 3,000 U.S. jails in 2019, she wrote.
In addition, jailed people are also disproportionately likely to face health challenges. They are more likely to report having had chronic health issues, infectious diseases, mental illnesses and substance use problems.
“The United States’ remarkably high population of incarcerated people — and the composition of that population — are related to decades’ worth of cuts in social welfare programs, structural racism, local and national political trends, and policing practices,” she wrote. “Research has shown that the cash bail system — a key driver of high jail turnover — ‘punishes the poor’ by ensuring that they are more likely to be detained than their wealthier counterparts for the same crime. A reliance on cash bail also reportedly increases recidivism and undermines public safety.”
In Vermont, we have seen on these pages many instances of how the court system varies greatly, sometimes by county and even by judge. It has created frustration for law enforcement, and now, it would seem, there is a toll being taken in the prison system itself.
Lawmakers are being urged to take a hard look at Vermont’s system. We would say that examination is timely and overdue.
