New Research: More Evidence That County Jail Incarceration Harms Health, Raising Death Rates

Date:  06-29-2025 The health burdens of jail expansion are heaviest in places that already lock a lot of people up. Those places also would see the largest benefits from decarceration, including fewer deaths each year.

From Prison Policy Initiative: It is tough to get nationally-representative, individual-level data on incarceration’s health impacts. But researchers are increasingly providing evidence that the criminalization of poverty, addiction, and mental health issues has sharp harmful consequences. Jailing in general is associated with higher mortality (death) rates. At the community level, higher levels of jailing causes more communicable and noncommunicable disease, mortality, and harms maternal health. For individual people, jailing has major impacts on mental health and maternal-child health. A new cohort study by a group of scholars at the U.S. Census Bureau, the Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, and the medical school at Mount Sinai published in the medical research journal, JAMA Network Open adds to the evidence and has important local policy implications. This study, led by Dr. Utsha Khatri, found that people incarcerated on a given day in 2008 had a 39% higher risk of death compared to similar people who were not incarcerated, and their risk of overdose death was 208% higher. Additionally, the paper suggests that expanding the use or size of local jails is associated with more deaths county-wide. These nationally-representative findings build upon previous research linking incarceration and mortality. What makes this paper particularly useful for policymakers and advocates is its effort to measure the impacts of both individual experiences of incarceration and county jail incarceration rates. County jail rates measure how much a given county relies on jailing as a response to issues of health and safety. How counties use their jails varies widely across the United States; the jail incarceration rate in Nashville is over five times the rate in Minneapolis, to cite just one example. This new study drew county-level jail rates from the Vera Institute’s Incarceration Trends Project dataset and leveraged local variation to better understand how jails impact death rates, breaking out overdose deaths for special attention. One caveat worth noting on the individual-level impacts: because millions of people flow through local jails each year, the findings in the study may understate the harms of incarceration. Read the full paper here.