How we reported on abysmal conditions and tragic deaths in LA County’s jail system

Last year, while my colleague and I were reporting on conditions in the L.A. County jail system, I read a report from a court-appointed monitor which gave me pause. 

The monitor expressed concern in his report about a spike in suicide deaths within L.A. jails during the first part of 2021. My editor encouraged me to request the rest of the data for 2021, and the full year’s numbers were alarming. 

For my USC Center for Health Journalism Data Fellowship project, I pulled all in-custody deaths going back to 2010. Coroners’ records I obtained through a Public Records Act request show that 2021 marked the highest number of deaths by suicide inside the downtown jail complex in eight years.

The rise in suicide deaths comes at a time when the L.A. County Jail system is plagued by a number of issues: Facilities are overcrowded, jail officials are struggling to maintain a mental health workforce, and the jails are out of compliance with requirements mandated by federal court.

The issues affecting the L.A. County jail system are not new. 

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice entered into a settlement agreement with the county after a DOJ investigation into mental health care at county jails “found a pattern of constitutionally deficient mental health care for prisoners, including inadequate suicide prevention practices.”

In 2021, the suicide rate at the jail complex downtown was about one per every 1,000 people. That’s more than 10 times the suicide rate for L.A. County in 2020.

Working with this data, it was extremely sobering to remember that every line entry was a life, someone who had died by suicide while incarcerated. 

I wanted to put faces to some of the entries in this spreadsheet filled with nameless deaths, so I began reaching out to people who might be able to put me in touch with families who have lost a loved one to suicide while incarcerated.  

In my reporting over the years, I’ve learned that advocacy groups and attorneys who have represented families in unlawful death lawsuits are often willing to put you in touch with people who they have represented or rallied around. 

Talking with families about some of the worst moments in their lives requires patience and care. Sometimes interviews can take months to get, so I started early reaching out to groups and individuals who were affected by one of the suicide deaths in 2021. 

While the data on in-custody suicide deaths was the starting point for my project, finding affected family members took much more work. It also involved pulling court records, which is an often confusing and opaque system to navigate. While working with court records was a skill I already had from previous reporting, this project required going physically to court facilities new to me as well as being diligent with clerks who were not very helpful at first. 

Another thing I found very supportive when writing my story was the experience of having physically gone to the jails I was referring to. I had been outside these jail facilities for other stories, but having to pull records at the jail facility downtown allowed me to see firsthand how dilapidated the buildings are from the inside, too. It’s one thing to read over and over again in county reports that a building is “crumbling,” but it’s another to see it for yourself. 

Going into this project I imagined all of the things I could glean from having a robust spreadsheet that included demographic data, age, place of death and more. I wanted to do geographic visualizations, have multiple charts and more. 

But in working with my senior fellow and drilling down into the data, I realized that this project was foremost about the spike in suicide deaths, and that could be visualized fairly simply. This project was also a good lesson to show that sometimes hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet can be crystallized into just a couple of sentences. And that’s okay. 

Reporting on L.A. County’s jail system can leave you feeling overwhelmingly pessimistic. But in talking with jail experts, I did find some brief moments of hope. One expert I spoke with talked about a new program that’s slated to allow incarcerated individuals to take advantage of some Medicaid benefits 90 days before their release. Those services could include case management, consultation with outside providers and medication-assisted therapy.

Protecting my own mental health while reporting this story was also something I had to work hard to do. It didn’t help that I was working on two other feature stories that involved tragic deaths and grieving family members. I also had to assist in the coverage of a local mass shooting as well as the death of three men at the hands of police. It was important to step back from these stories periodically. In the future, I would be wise to balance stories like this project out with stories that are less heartbreaking. 

I’m glad that I picked a project where I could build off of my previous reporting. What’s more, I’m confident the skills I learned working on this project will make future reporting on the L.A. County jail system stronger. 

The L.A. County jail system is unfortunately one of the biggest mental health facilities in the country. As I continue to cover mental health in SoCal, the problems facing the jails — especially caring for people with a serious mental illness — will continue to seem intractable. But I’m grateful I have some new tools that will hopefully allow me to write stories about a system and enveloped in darkness.