Sunday, February 18, 2007

Texas criminal justice news roundup

Several news items caught my eye this morning:

1 comment:

markm said...

On the deaths in jail: There's no excuse for the guards ignoring an obvious medical crisis, but is the death rate anything unusual? That's about 17 deaths a year, from a population that sometimes tops 9,000, or about 2 deaths per 1,000 inmates per year. If that was a random sample of the population, we'd all have a life expectancy of 500 years.

Of course, it isn't a random sample. These are mostly young people, who have a much lower death rate in general. OTOH, they are mostly criminals, who tend not to take good care of themselves and to frequently engage in quite risky behavior. So I've got no idea if they're more or less likely to die while jailed than when they're free.