Rising Deaths in Los Angeles County Jail Linked to Longer Stays
by Michael Dean Thompson
A new study by University of California, Los Angeles’s Carceral Ecologies Lab has found that deaths in Los Angeles County Jail, which refers to eight actual facilities, are tied to longer stays. These results differ significantly from federal data which suggest overdose deaths, at least, are more likely to happen on the first day of incarceration.
The study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, examined data dating from 2008 to 2023 acquired from the LA Sheriff’s Department, LA Department of the Medical Examiner, California’s Department of Justice and LA County Office of the Inspector General that was acquired using web scrapers (software that “crawls” websites to collect data) and public records requests, including pay-per-record autopsy data.
One of the surprising findings was that the median time from arrest to death was 57.5 days. In other words, half of all in-custody deaths occur after a detainee had been in jail for almost two months. The national data has fed into the narrative that people typically die in the first day or soon after due to drug overdose at the time of arrest or from drug withdrawal. Nicholas Shapiro, the corresponding author and associate professor in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, said in a press briefing, “People are dying of overdoses, not from substances they imbibed around the time of arrest, but from substances they had access to in jail.” He added, “To us, this suggests that people in the LA County Jail are self-medicating because of dismal conditions, and that they’re also a captive market for people who get drugs into the jail.”
During the years studied, the median time in the Jail before a death was 57.5 days, but the median time spent in the Jail was only 11 days. That means that reducing the amount of time people spend in LA County Jail system would serve to reduce the number of deaths. Furthermore, more than two-thirds of those who died had not yet been convicted of a crime.
Suicide accounted for 15% of all deaths in the Jail, a rate three times higher than California’s population as a whole.
In general, people incarcerated in the Jail were 13% more likely to die of any cause than the general population after the results were adjusted for the ages of the individuals. Drug overdoses had a 50% higher risk of death. In addition, heart disease was 86% more likely to cause death and pulmonary embolisms were shockingly more than 11 times more likely. The data implies that the stress of incarceration, depression and inadequate healthcare are the leading factors in the deaths.
“Our findings tell a very different story concerning the timing of LA County Jail deaths than the prevailing understanding of jail deaths nationally,” Sharon Dolovich said in the press release. She is a professor of law at UCLA and coauthor on the paper. She added, “Since the pandemic, many people have died well into their stays in the LA County Jail from drug overdoses, suicides, and other preventable causes, making the jail a site of countless deaths of despair.”
The Jail’s medical system needs improvement in dealing with preventable deaths, which can have outsized positive effects. According to Shapiro, “We know that people going into jail tend to have poorer health to begin with, but our study shows that, even though they are more likely to have diabetes, for example, they’re less likely to die of it in the LA County Jail than in the general public, which shows that when the healthcare system invests in healthcare, it can reduce mortality.”
The study findings point back to some of the same arguments that have been made by advocates. If we wish to increase the survivability of a jail stay, there are some key actions we need to take:
Reduce the number of people in jail
Reduce the amount of time people spend in jail
Improve medical care
Reduce the influx of drugs
The study comes as deaths in the LA County Jail approach record highs. There were 46 deaths in the jail in 2025. That number has been exceeded only in 2021, at the height of COVID-19-related deaths in the lockup.
Source: UCLA
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