Last April, a 34-year-old U.S. Army veteran named Alex Jimenez was arrested in his hometown of Warrenton as he was walking down the street. When Alex didn’t respond to the officers, they tased him. The officers secured a medical clearance to book Alex in jail and brought him to the Clatsop County Jail. Alex struggled. Several jail deputies forced him onto the concrete floor and used their bodies to hold him face down. Alex stopped breathing, and died a few hours later.
Alex Jimenez wasn’t the only person to die in Oregon jails last year. In a year when jail populations were cut in half, the percentage of people dying in jail or police custody doubled. In fact, Oregon saw more jail deaths than any of the years for which we have data.
At least 10 people died in 2020. An investigative report that Disability Rights Oregon released last month, “Grave Consequences: How the Criminalization of Disability Leads to Deaths in Jail,” found that the majority of people who died in Oregon jails last year, like Alex Jimenez, had a disability.
Suicide is the leading cause of death in jail. Five individuals had documented mental health conditions and six committed suicide. In September 2020, Oregon jails reported 212 in-facility suicide attempts over the previous year. Eight had documented substance use disorders and six were incarcerated for charges related to their substance use when they died in custody.
These deaths occurred in jails across the state: Clatsop, Deschutes, Jackson, Klamath, Marion and Polk counties, as well as the Springfield Municipal Jail and the NORCOR detention center in The Dalles. And many, if not most, of these deaths were preventable.
The alarming rise in deaths in jails is a result of the use of force, inadequate medical and mental health care, insufficient screening and failure to follow safety protocols. Systemic failures both within jail walls and far beyond allowed these dangerous practices and policies to persist.
Jails are shielded from public scrutiny like few other places in society. There are no clear data or centralized entity that tracks jail deaths in Oregon. Jails are subjected only to voluntary, unenforceable oversight by jail and sheriff staff from other counties.
Within this oversight vacuum, DRO found the following measures meant to protect the health and safety of inmates are dangerous or wholly inadequate:
• Jails use dangerous restraint practices banned in schools and clinical settings. The restraint that the officers at the Clatsop County Jail used on Alex Jimenez that caused his death is called a “prone restraint” or face down. It’s a life-threatening restraint technique that contributes directly to the inability to breathe and drastically increases the risk of death. It should be banned in the criminal justice system.
• Jails are failing to identify and prevent suicides: None of the six individuals who died by suicide last year were on suicide watch, despite indications in some cases that the person was at risk, and all died by hanging. The most common suicide watch precautions in Oregon jails are largely punitive and can increase a person’s risk of suicide by deterring them from seeking help when they feel suicidal.
• Jails do not provide quality medical care and are ill-equipped to monitor serious medical and mental health conditions: Oregon law does not set any baseline standard for health care in jails. People in custody in many counties are left without access to basic health care and lifesaving treatment.
Eight days after being booked at the NORCOR jail in The Dalles, a 26-year old woman named Jennifer McLaren died there of pneumonia, a treatable illness. She complained of rib pain on arrival in the jail. For several days, jail staff dismissed her requests to be taken to the hospital. Similar circumstances led to another detainee dying in a different Oregon jail in 2020.
We also found that systemic failures by hospitals contributed to people dying in jail. Federal law requires hospitals to provide stabilizing emergency care to people in medical and behavioral health crises, including people brought prior to booking in jail. Yet, Oregon sheriffs and jail commanders reported that local hospitals regularly clear patients for jail transport, regardless of the severity of their medical or mental health condition.
In two cases we reviewed, hospital staff quickly released the individuals with conditions that ultimately contributed to their death. One of those individuals was Alex Jimenez. The officers brought him to a local hospital for stabilizing treatment. A doctor briefly observed Alex as he sat in the back of the police car, and cleared him to be booked.
The state must create robust mental and physical health care standards for Oregon jails. Oversight systems must be in place to guarantee that jails meet those standards. As we take steps to strengthen health and safety protections inside jails, we should not lose sight of how crucial it is to prevent the criminalization and improper incarceration of people with disabilities.
The number of deaths in Oregon jails is climbing. Until we, as a state, define what it looks like to give people the health care and protections to which they’re entitled in jail — and the community-based health care and support they need to avoid the criminal justice system — we will not stem this rising tide of unnecessary death.