The U.S. government collects data on who's dying in jails around the country, but keeps the information secret. So, Reuters conducted its own tally of deaths in America's jails, pinpointing where botched healthcare and bad jailkeeping are claiming lives.
Michele Deitch is a corrections expert specializing in U.S. jails conditions. "There is no more fundamental question we should be able to answer than how safe or how dangerous is a jail facility. And yet we are not able to answer that question. We don't know how much violence there is, how many deaths there are, what kind of medical issues people have. There is a fundamental lack of data about what is going on in our jails in this country… we need some kind of system that allows us to compare from facility to facility so we can answer questions about how safe, how dangerous is a particular jail and what could be done that would improve things."