Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will be using her mantra of “criminal justice reform” to power her towards victory this coming November. At the top of the list of things she should tackle on day one of her presidency should be Texas. Not because its the home state of former presidents Bush I and Bush II–well, actually, yeah because of that–but mainly because about seven thousand people … 6,913 to be exact … died while in the custody of Texas law enforcement over a ten year period. Six thousand, nine hundred and thirteen.
The Atlantic is reporting that a first-ever database, launched this past Wednesday, lists each death that has occured in the state since 2005. Those deaths can be in the custody of jails or prisons, or they can be at the hands of police, whether the victim had been arrested or not.
This information used to be hard to access, but it’s now readily available in an online database called the Texas Justice Initiative. “Some family members may not have gotten a full account of how their loved one died, so in that way I feel some responsibility about making the information public,” said Amanda Woog, the postdoctoral legal fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin who created it. When we spoke, she was unsure of what the response to the project, which launched on Wednesday, would be. But she seemed very optimistic that it would be valuable for policymakers, researchers, journalists, justice administrators, academics, and advocates. Her main goal was to make the information widely available and easy to access.
The website of the Texas Justice Initiative says its purpose is “... to build narratives around who is dying in Texas’ criminal justice system, bring attention to the lives that have been lost, and provide a foundation for research toward solutions that will save lives.” The lives that were lost include those via natural cases while in the care and custody of the state, as well as through inmate violence, suicides, and interactions with the police.
“These deaths occurred in local jail cells, in the backs of police cars, and on prison sidewalks,” Woog wrote in the summary report of her findings. Among the “suicide” listings is one for Sandra Bland, who died in police custody after a traffic stop. Like Bland, more than 1,900 of those who died, or 28 percent, had not been convicted of or even charged with a crime. “These extra-judicial deaths in custody are diffuse. They occur at every point and phase of our criminal-justice system, in a manner that remains largely untracked and unexamined,” Woog wrote.
Texas is not the only state that needs a database of those who have died while in its care and custody. That is a simple truth. Its also a tragic one.