Instead, he sat in Men's Central Jail for more than two years, waiting for his chance at trial.

::::

No one knows how many people die in jails and prisons across the country each year, so it's difficult to say how the problem in Los Angeles compares to other places. But over the past few years, the deteriorating conditions and rising death tolls in lockups from New York to Texas to California have attracted increasing scrutiny.

A decade ago, there were more than 18,600 inmates in the Los Angeles County jails, but by the end of last year that figure had fallen to under 12,200, according to county data. Over the same span, state data shows the death toll rose from 28 in 2014 to at least 50 in 2021 before falling to 45 last year.

Despite the lack of consensus on the cause of that uptick, there are some clear trends. A Times analysis of records from the California Department of Justice shows that natural deaths in Los Angeles jails have gone up 40% since 2014, while the number of unnatural deaths — a category that includes homicides, suicides and overdoses — rose by at least 65%.

Last month, a government watchdog report noted a similar shift in federal prisons, where unnatural deaths went up by roughly 50% from 2014 to 2021. And, as in Los Angeles, the report found that skipped welfare checks, slow responses and other negligence were some of the factors that may have contributed to that increase.

In Los Angeles County, those lapses are readily apparent in the rising number of overdoses. Last year, Sheriff's Department officials said that out of 45 jail inmate deaths, 12 were drug-related — more than twice as many as a decade earlier when the jail population was much larger.

In one case, a 35-year-old man overdosed on a jail bus in September, according to a quarterly oversight report. Staff waited 15 minutes to pull over and render aid, and the man died later at a hospital.

Three months later, another quarterly report showed that jailers at North County Correctional Facility in Castaic skipped several required safety checks before discovering an inmate who had overdosed. As in several other cases The Times reviewed, jailers only learned of the medical emergency after other inmates summoned them for help.

When a 29-year-old collapsed at North County Correctional Facility in 2022, other inmates were the first to respond, administering an overdose-reversing drug the Sheriff's Department now keeps mounted on the jail walls. It was only after the man died that officials discovered that jail surveillance footage had captured him loading a makeshift syringe at his bunk and asking another inmate to help him inject it into his neck, according to autopsy records. Deputies later reported seeing him inject drugs on camera a few weeks before his death.

...continued

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.