The Oregon Department of Corrections has recorded an average of nearly one prisoner death per week since mid-September. One person died just one month after being admitted into Oregon State Penitentiary. The youngest was a 27-year-old woman.
From Sept. 14 to Nov. 28, the 10 prisoners who died in custody were between the ages 27 and 81. According to the police reports, eight of them were under hospice care. Neither the Department of Corrections nor Oregon State Police, which investigates prison deaths, have released the cause of these deaths.
According to Department of Corrections figures, the average annual number of deaths in Department of Corrections custody from 2010-2019 was 37. As of Nov. 28, there have been 46 prisoner deaths in 2021, inching closer to matching or exceeding the highest number of prisoner deaths in recent history — 50 deaths, recorded in 2016 and 2020.
Juan Chavez, project director and attorney with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, said he is shocked by the number of deaths there have been in recent months.
“It’s disturbing,” he said.
Part of this, he believes, is a result of the inefficient health care system in Oregon Department of Corrections prisons, especially since most of the calls he gets are from prisoners hoping to take legal action regarding delayed or ignored treatment.
“Anecdotally (inadequate health care) is probably four-fifths of the phone calls we get,” Chavez said. “It’s one of those topics where I have to quadruple check whether or not I should take this case, and more often than not I don’t. The story I hear commonly is that they’re going to delay treatment for as long as possible because early prevention is too expensive.”
Many people in prison may not even be aware of the option to sue. Even for those who do file a lawsuit, it’s a costly process, and they must file it in a timely manner when a specific incident occurs, Chavez said.
More often than not, there is insufficient evidence to support the cases — a major reason Chavez doesn’t take many of them.
“You have to show proof that they knew and then ignored you,” Chavez said. “The medical files are pretty slim, but it’s amazing how little they wrote down. So it becomes a fight that prisoners lose one after the other. How do you sue the people who are tasked with keeping you alive?”
Chavez said many prisoners already suffer from health issues, and then oftentimes they’re worsened while in custody, which compounds the problem.
“Their bodies are physiologically older because of socioeconomic or health-related things that have happened in their lives or that are currently happening to them in prison,” Chavez said.
Jennifer Black, Department of Corrections spokesperson, said more than half of the adults in department custody are medically vulnerable to COVID-19.
“(Oregon Department of Corrections) currently has over 7,000 of our adult in custody population designated as medically vulnerable to COVID-19,” Black said in an email to Street Roots. “That is about 60% of our total population. Most, if not all of our (adult in custody) population, would have some form of pre-existing condition prior to incarceration.”
Between the start of the pandemic and Nov. 21, 44 prisoners died in custody and tested positive for COVID-19 at their time of death. There were 3,838 cumulative positive cases in the Department of Corrections system as of Nov. 21.
In response to the recent number of deaths in the Department of Corrections custody since mid-September, Black said several contributing factors are at play.
"So it becomes a fight that prisoners lose one after the other. How do you sue the people who are tasked with keeping you alive?"
“We understand that many of our patients come to us in poor health, often related to lack of primary care and preventative services prior to incarceration,” Black said. “In addition, as our population ages, we have seen increased morbidity and mortality that further adds to this problem.”
Chavez said in the past two years, natural disasters including wildfires and heat waves and then the pandemic have all proven how prisons are not equipped to handle these situations while keeping the adults inside safe and healthy.
“What more proof do we need?” Chavez said. “They gave themselves zero margin of error when they decided to hold everybody in the prison through a pandemic. We should not be incarcerating people nowhere close to the rate we are doing it, because they are packed in like sardines.”
Poor ventilation, barriers to health care and densely populated spaces all contribute to deaths in prisons and highlight existing issues.
Symptomatic of systemic issues
Nationally, prison deaths have been increasing year after year, according to national nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, which tracks prison mortality data. Earlier this year, the nonprofit analyzed the most recently available data from 2018, and the results revealed that homicides, suicides and drug and alcohol overdoses have increased nationwide.
Wanda Bertram, Prison Policy Initiative communications strategist, said health care access for the general public is something people already struggle with, so the demands of those on the inside often get drowned out.
“We think that people in prison have a constitutional right to health care when in fact, health care is and has been quite bad in prisons,” Bertram said. “In the abstract, I think most people would say that people in prison should be given their constitutional rights.”
She said the pandemic put severe strain on medical units in prisons because for anyone who had a medical complaint in prison unrelated to COVID, they’d be told they didn’t have the capacity to help.
“Because of this, even though we don’t have the data to show this yet, my strong sense is that people with underlying conditions and chronic illnesses have seen those problems get worse,” Bertram says.
The deaths in recent months bring to attention the barriers to health care that adults in custody must go through to access even basic health services.
Dr. Marc Stern, former assistant secretary for health services for the Washington State Department of Corrections, said getting treatment for any type of health complications while incarcerated is a lengthy and tricky process. Receiving adequate medical attention in a timely manner is not as easy as it is for the average citizen, who can walk into a doctor’s office or dig in their medicine cabinet at home for quick pain relief.
“One of the big problems in accessing health care, first of all, it’s hard to get over-the-counter medications and have them at your bedside,” Stern, an expert in correctional health care, said. “Every time you have a headache you have to notify somebody and depending on the notification system, you’re at the mercy of officers.”
Stern, now an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington and consultant on correctional health care, left the Washington State Department of Corrections in 2008 after raising ethical concerns about the involvement of medical staff in executions.
Stern said one of the first problems prisoners run into is guards who are either improperly trained or don’t have the right attitude about the matter.
“The only way I can get to a nurse is through an officer, and if that officer doesn’t allow that to happen or delays it or misinterprets it, then (inmates) can suffer,” Stern said.
Chavez often comes across adults in custody looking to sue for this exact reason. He recently filed a case for an incarcerated woman who felt an oncoming seizure since she recognized her developing epilepsy symptoms, but was ignored by a prison guard who refused to call for medical aid.
“The guard told her to stop wasting his time, and if you’re still breathing, don’t bother me with this,” Chavez said. “She got sent back to her cell. She had a seizure and hurt her head and shoulder.”
Chavez said the already poor health conditions many prisoners are in, combined with the attitude and training of the staff, can be a significant contributor to delayed treatment resulting in a worsened health status.
“The vast majority of staff at ODOC still think every act of their stay must be punished,” Chavez said. “That gatekeeping mentality comes from an ideological place, like, ‘stop complaining you have free health care’ mentality — look at all the good that gets you. Those twin problems create a lot of these catastrophic health issues.”
Chavez said delayed treatment is especially common for people who are near their release date, that way it will no longer be an issue that the correctional facilities have to resolve and pay for.
“We just need better health care for folks on the inside, and we save ourselves a lot of these problems down the line when they’re in the community and requiring even more health care services,” Chavez said. “We need a true inpatient therapy center for people if we’re at all going to live up to these ideals of reconciliation and accountability and all that.”