Louisiana behaving badly
Posted: Mon Feb 26, 2024 9:12 am
‘Egregious’: Louisiana prisons have experienced 50% spike in deaths, report says
Healthcare in the state’s prisons is known for being deathly inadequate – and the incarceration rate may keep growing
Poet Wolfe in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Mon 26 Feb 2024 13.00 CET
Lois Ratcliff says she hardly survived watching her son slowly die in one of the US south’s most brutal prisons.
Ratcliff’s son, Farrell Sampier, was one of the at least 500 incarcerated people – most of whom were Black men over the age of 55 – who died within Louisiana’s prison system in the last three years, according to a recent report by Loyola University New Orleans’s college of law. And another report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the most prison deaths between 2018 and 2022 occurred at Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison.
Sampier not only was in Angola serving a 20-year prison sentence for manslaughter. He was also one of the many incarcerated plaintiffs who testified in a class-action lawsuit that in 2023 resulted in federal oversight for the prison, where healthcare had been deemed deathly inadequate and unconstitutional.
While Louisiana appeals the ruling, arguing that Angola’s healthcare has improved, the state’s prison population is expected to continue ageing and dying under the state’s far-right governor Jeff Landry, who took office in January after running on a tough-on-crime platform. He convened a special legislative session on 19 February aimed at enacting a swathe of criminal justice measures that reform advocates worry could send the state’s incarceration rate soaring again and put even more people in the position Sampier was once in.
That’s an especially frightening proposition for advocates who know Sampier was one of at least 1,600 incarcerated people to die within Louisiana lockups – including pre-trial jails and juvenile detention centers – from 2015 to 2021, the Loyola report revealed. And, the report found, there was a 50% spike in deaths at Louisiana incarceration centers from 2019 to 2022.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ort-angola