Why Do Detainees Keep Dying in This Baton Rouge Jail?
In one decade, 45 people died in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. Most were charged with nonviolent misdemeanors. Most didn’t have their day in court. Most were Black. How did the system fail them?
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Lamar Johnson was driving to pick up his grandmother from dialysis in May of 2015 when a Baker, Louisiana, police officer pulled him over because his car windows were tinted. Four days later, a guard found the 27-year-old hanging in his cell at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison.
Years before Covid-19 ravaged correctional facilities across the United States, the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison (EBRPP) experienced its own prolonged wave of death. From 2009 to 2019, 45 prisoners died in the jail’s custody, which is nearly double the national average. Most of the deceased had been arrested for nonviolent crimes and had not had their day in court.
EBRPP is a dilapidated, overcrowded facility that was built in 1965. Detainees there have spoken of bedbugs, spider bites, and rats in the stew. Residents of the parish rejected a tax to build a new jail, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal rejected Medicaid expansion, which shuttered the public hospital and privatized health care at the jail. Throw in an underfunded public defender’s office that often has to wait years for cases to go to trial, a Baton Rouge Metro Council that won’t allot the recommended funding in the city’s budget for humane treatment, and policies that do not protect the lives of incarcerated people. Taken together, these realities provide a clear picture of the criminalization of poverty in America, which can be a death sentence that disproportionately affects Black and Brown people.
Jails primarily hold pretrial detainees who cannot afford cash bail, whereas prisons hold convicted people serving out their sentences. In other words, jails are intended to hold while prisons are…
