Loyola University of New Orleans Law School will release a database of inmate deaths at all Louisiana prisons.
The project is the brainchild of Professor Andrea Armstrong who said up until now there hasn’t been a centralized collection of data about when, where, and how state inmates have died.
“You and I and my auntie, we are all paying for these jails and prisons and therefore should be entitled to know how these institutions are performing with our money,” said Armstrong.
Before receiving grant money to upscale the project Armstrong personally kept data on inmate deaths at Orleans Parish Prison. The 410,000 dollar, two-year grant was provided by Arnold Ventures.
Armstrong said 80 percent of US prisons will go a full calendar year without an inmate death. With this database, we can measure how Louisiana prisons stack up to that expectation.
“From some of the initial data that we are getting we are seeing that in fact there are plenty of our jails and detention centers that are not following that national pattern,” said Armstrong.
Louisiana is home to 130 jails, prisons, and detention centers and has the highest incarceration rate in the country. The state also does not require its corrections department to keep a centralized and publicly accessible list of deaths.
Armstrong said using public information requests she and her law students are compiling a detailed list of inmate deaths going back to 2015. She says the database will be highly granular.
“You can search the database just for suicide-related deaths and try to understand what types of policies and practices might be impacting those deaths,” said Armstrong.
Armstrong said the database will be a first-of-its-kind in the nation effort and she hopes it can be a template that is reproduced across the country. A website where you can download and search the data is set to be released sometime in spring.
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