New research finds higher county jail rates have deadly consequences for entire communities

A recent study from a researcher at University of Pennsylvania finds that higher jail rates are associated with higher death rates, especially for Black people and women.

by Emily Widra and Wendy Sawyer

The health, social, and economic harms of incarceration extend far beyond the people behind bars to their children, families, and entire communities, as a large body of research has shown. New research from Anneliese Luck at the University of Pennsylvania adds to this evidence, finding strong links between higher county jail incarceration rates and higher county mortality (death) rates. While researchers have already established the clear connections between jail incarceration, community health, and deaths, Luck’s analysis in The Distribution of Carceral Harm: County-level jail incarceration and mortality by race, sex, and age reveals how these connections vary across age, sex, and race. Generally, Luck finds that higher jail rates are associated with higher death rates for Black people and for women than for white people and men — with the notable exception of older Black men, for whom the “mortality penalty” of higher jail rates is most dramatic.

Luck’s analysis of racial differences is a particularly important contribution, given that the burden of incarceration falls disproportionately on Black communities. While Black people make up less than 14% of the U.S. population, they account for 42% of people who are incarcerated; unsurprisingly, Black people are also overrepresented among people with an incarcerated family member. Ultimately, Luck’s breakdown of the relationship between higher jail rates and elevated death rates by demographic characteristics gives us a clearer picture of the carceral system’s disproportionate impacts on the health and well-being of some of the most vulnerable populations.

Key findings from this study

The results of this study support our understanding that policing and criminalization disproportionately impact the same communities that are most vulnerable to any number of negative outcomes, including high unemployment rates, decreased life expectancy, worse health and worse access to healthcare, and exposure to environmental dangers, inevitably contributing to the observed differences in community death rates.

Race-specific measures reveal more about the link between incarceration and death rates

By incorporating race-specific measures into the analysis, Luck’s new study is able to show how different demographic groups in the same communities fare under aggressive jailing. Importantly, it also demonstrates that using “race-neutral” measures, as most previous studies do, actually underestimates the scale of the “mortality penalty” — that is, the increase in death rates associated with increases in jail rates. To show this, Luck ran her analysis again using total population rates (i.e., not differentiated by race), and found increases in total jail rates were associated with death rate increases of 0.3 to 1% across the various demographic groups she studied. While this is a statistically significant difference, using race-specific measures yielded a much greater difference in death rates (1.4% to 1.9%). As a result, the new study’s use of race-specific data provides a more nuanced look at the people facing the most serious harms associated with jail incarceration.

Higher jail rates are associated with greater increases in death rates for women than men

The new study finds that both Black and white women’s death rates in almost every age group increase more dramatically with higher jail rates than men’s do. An increase of one standard deviation in the white jail rate (400 per 100,000) corresponds to an increase in the death rate by 1.4% for white men and 1.9% for white women of all ages. An increase of one standard deviation in the Black jail rate (1,500 per 100,000) corresponds to an increase in the death rate by 1.8% for Black men and 1.7% for Black women of all ages — but this is driven by a single age group of Black men (65+) for whom the increase in mortality is more than twice that of Black women (65+), as we explain below. For all other age groups, the “mortality penalty” is higher for Black women than Black men. Because men are incarcerated at rates far higher than women, the impact of the carceral system on women’s lives is often overlooked, but this research underscores the need to study how mass incarceration endangers women’s lives inside and outside of jails and prisons, too.

As other research has shown, jail incarceration disproportionately impacts women’s well-being and health in a number of ways. The rising jail rates of women mean that more and more women are directly impacted by the carceral system, and those women are more likely to have medical conditions and face higher jail death rates than men. Indirectly, women are profoundly impacted by the detention and incarceration of family members: 1 in 4 women have had a family member incarcerated. Higher incarceration rates are associated with a host of negative health consequences for non-incarcerated women: increased frequency of adverse reproductive health outcomes, diminished access to healthcare, and elevated rates of new HIV infections. There are also serious financial repercussions for women with incarcerated loved ones which can ultimately have downstream effects on health and mortality.

The one exception: The “mortality penalty” is greatest for Black men 65 and older

The larger increases in women’s death rates that we see with higher jail rates are consistent across all age groups and both races — except among Black people 65 or older. Across counties with higher Black jail rates, the death rates of Black women under 65 were 1% to 3.4% higher (depending on the age group) than in the counties with lower Black jail rates; these are greater differences than observed among Black men under 65 in the same counties. However, for people 65 years or older, this trend was reversed: higher Black jail rates were associated with a 2.1% increase in death rates for Black men over 65, but a smaller 1% increase in death rates for Black women over 65. The author explains the implications of this finding:

“The disproportionate toll absorbed by older Black populations—particularly men, and largely driven by coupling of the increasing penalties of jail incarceration with already high levels of mortality—calls attention to the ways racial inequalities in incarceration may exacerbate other forms of socioeconomic, political, social, and health disadvantage that have been historically shouldered by Black individuals in the United States.”

Because Luck’s research is among the first to examine the relationship between jail incarceration and mortality by race, sex, and age, these findings offer new and damning evidence for what we already know: the burdens associated with incarceration are disproportionately carried by those who are already most vulnerable to other socioeconomic disadvantages.

Conclusion

This study contributes to the growing body of evidence that mass incarceration has fatal consequences that extend far beyond jail cells and prison walls. Luck’s use of race-specific jail rates to assess the ways in which jail incarceration affects white men and women differently from Black men and women calls attention to the racially disparate community consequences of incarceration.

Women and older Black men are particularly vulnerable to the “mortality penalty” associated with higher jail incarceration rates, suggesting that jails contribute to the “uneven geography of health and mortality” across the United States. In addition, this research underscores the role jails and short jail stays play in public health. While much research on the association between population-level health outcomes and incarceration has been focused on policing and prisons, these new findings emphasize the need for research to incorporate local jails into our understanding of how the carceral system hurts the health of individuals, families, and communities.

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For more information, including our methodology and detailed footnotes, see the full version of this briefing on our website.