Alum’s Incarceration Transparency Project Tracks Inmate Deaths

Andrea Armstrong *01 wants society to care about the dire conditions faced by incarcerated Americans, a demographic who often die in their cells at alarmingly high rates.

The law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans has spent the past five years developing and fine-tuning the Incarceration Transparency project, an online database of information about the deaths in every prison, jail, and youth detention facility in Louisiana and South Carolina since 2015.

The project produced a heat map of Louisiana parishes and the number of inmates who have died in each area, while also providing users with a breakdown of each inmate death. The details are thorough, noting the cause of death, date of death, and nationality and age (if possible) of each inmate who died in that parish.

In 2023, Armstrong’s research and advocacy for incarcerated Americans led to her winning a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, in which she received a no-string attached award of $800,000 distributed over the next five years.

Image

Andrea Armstrong *01

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

She says it’s about time researchers, academics, and advocates had access to data that should be readily available. “If there is information about how many people die in car accidents, die of cancer, why not be more public about the data of deaths of inmates?” Armstrong asks.

Finding those statistics requires making public record requests to state agencies, which may take weeks, but it’s a far cry from the delay Armstrong has seen with federal data. In 2019, when she launched the project, she requested data from the Justice Department on inmate deaths and received a reply two years later.

Working on Incarceration Transparency has led Armstrong to some concerning conclusions. “We are seeing spikes in preventable deaths, and these are deaths due to suicides and drugs, and it’s particularly troubling because jails and prisons are supposed to be secure spaces,” she says.

She notes how some sheriffs have recognized how her data can help curb the infiltration of drugs into their jails, but “many others simply shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Well, this is just the way it is, drugs are always coming into our spaces.’”

An alarming stat she would like to see reversed are pretrial deaths. She says around 14% of the deaths that her project has recorded (157 people) in Louisiana are of people being held pretrial, meaning there hasn't been a verdict on their charges. Sometimes, pretrial detention can last as long as five years.

“For deaths to occur pretrial, when there hasn’t been a determination on one’s guilt, this just shouldn’t happen,” she says.

Another theme running through the data is the high rate of suicide in jails (about 62%) in the two states studied, compared to 29% in state operated prisons. Often, she adds, these suicides happen in solitary confinement, which she characterizes as “a prison within a prison.”

She goes on to say how these are “one of the most secure and controlled spaces within a prison or a jail,” but for an inmate to have the time to construct a way to hang themself (the most common suicidal method in solitary) demonstrates a lack of personnel and training. 

“These acts of self-harm tell us this kind of space isn’t as closely observed as they should be,” Armstrong says.

These throughlines in her research inspire her to espouse for not a retrofit of any particular jail — despite the ongoing crisis of crowded institutions — but for a deeper look into the staffing in these jails.

“If we really want to save lives and reduce the number of preventable deaths, we need to focus on the people and the training,” Armstrong says, “and we want to encourage jails to have more robust staffing and bring on more nurses and doctors so that we can adequately provide the type of care that people need when they’re in our custody.”

Raised in New Orleans, Armstrong came to Princeton by way of a recommendation from her international relations professor at NYU, where she earned a certificate of advanced study in 1996. He encouraged her to apply for a master’s in public affairs.

She recalls, “He opened my eyes to a world that I didn't even know existed. I didn't know about that public policy school, and what I could learn there.”

What she found particularly enriching at Princeton was digging into numbers in a way she hadn’t experienced before. “I loved the statistics classes,” she says, “and if you're studying public policy, you have to understand statistics and probabilities and be able to engage with numbers, even if you are not a mathematician.”

Parsing through the overwhelming statistics at the core of the Incarceration Transparency project is a heady but fulfilling responsibility, Armstrong says. “This work has potential to create enormous change. Realize there are 10 million jail admissions every year, and for every person admitted into a jail, there is at least one other person that loves them. That’s 20 million people, at least, impacted by incarceration annually. One of the things that I want everyone to understand is that these folks are not just other people. These are our people.”