Loyola University Law School Professor Andrea Armstrong has developed a national reputation for her extensive jail and prison advocacy and research with a focus on deaths behind bars. In fall 2023, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of $800,000 she can spend over five years, no strings attached. She is on a sabbatical from Loyola Law. She made time to talk with columnist Will Sutton about some of the issues about which she is passionate. The interview was edited for accuracy and space.
SUTTON: There aren't many people who win a MacArthur Foundation award, what's often called a "genius" grant. How does it feel to be a genius?
ARMSTRONG: It seems they look at past work, but also the possibility and potential for the future. I feel a real responsibility to not only keep doing what I'm doing, but to get better at it and to go deeper and be even more thorough and meticulous around the work that I do.
SUTTON: I know there's no grant application, so you couldn't have applied for this. I know the process is anonymous. There are people who get to nominate candidates for the prestigious award, but the general public doesn't know. At this point, do you know who nominated you?
ARMSTRONG: I don't know who nominated me. Some people have come to me and said, 'Oh, I wrote for you.' Or, 'I got a call about you. And I couldn't tell you at the time.' That has been really amazing. Because what's become clear is that this was a team effort, that there were a lot of different people who think highly of what I do.
SUTTON: Oh, that's wonderful. You've now been known for your incarceration, jail and prison work, taking some rather deep dives, using data to drive your thoughts and your philosophies, considering how we can make incarceration systems more humane and how we can do better with treating those who are incarcerated. Is that a fair description of your work?
ARMSTRONG: Yeah, my work is really about conditions behind bars, whether that's a jail or prison. And really, what the cost of that is in lots of different ways. So the cost to families, the cost to communities, the cost to incarcerated people, the cost of staff. And then thinking about the laws and the rules that we've put in place to guide our behavior and our decisions.
SUTTON: I find any number of your data points to be shocking. There clearly are things you want more people to know. What is one data point that you think often surprises people?
ARMSTRONG: I think the one that is most surprising is that in our depth and custody work in Louisiana, the fact that there was no data. That's an anomaly because we know, generally, how many people are dying of cancer or heart attacks in our state. We know generally how many people are dying in motor vehicle accidents. But when it comes to deaths in jails, we had no idea. And yet deaths are happening in institutions and agencies that are funded by us to do a particular job. People are often shocked by the fact that approximately 14% of the deaths that we've recorded are of people being held pretrial, meaning there hasn't been a trial on their guilt or their innocence.
SUTTON: That's huge. You don't know the numbers, you can't get into the circumstances, you can't get into the why this might have happened, why it did happen and determined how it can be prevented. We didn't know about this until your work. So is this the 'deaths behind bars' work?
ARMSTRONG: Yes. That's the "behind bars" study we've done, looking at deaths 2015 to 2021. We have a website, www.incarcerationtransparency.org. You can go to a publicly accessible database. You can look by name. You can look by facility. You can look by cause of death. We want this to be transparent, so we kind of show our math, show our work with everything that we do.
SUTTON: I know you do this work elsewhere. But with a focus on Louisiana, would you say all 64 parishes have big problems with jails and incarcerated people dying?
ARMSTRONG: No. I think one of the things that I hope people take away from our work is that it is possible to operate a jail where nobody dies. Nationally, we know that 75% of jails do not have a custodial death. So where deaths are occurring is really going to be indicating more systemic problems in that facility, particularly where you have more than one death in a given calendar year in a facility. For example, in East Baton Rouge Parish, the jail is really outpacing any other jail facility in the state in terms of deaths. It leads to questions about why and what can we do so that people don't continue to die in that jail.
SUTTON: Why did you start looking at the Baton Rouge jail?
ARMSTRONG: We started looking at that jail separately, through some work that was happening after the murder of Alton Sterling. People were hearing about people who had died in that jail. We started collecting those names. One of the very first reports that I did was with another attorney at the Promise of Justice Initiative, Shanita Ferris. We analyzed deaths in that facility from 2012 to 2016. That was the start of some of this work that we're now doing statewide.
SUTTON: Are things getting better in the East Baton Rouge Parish jail?
ARMSTRONG: We are still seeing deaths continue in that facility. And so we have seen some changes. I applaud the Metro Council for being more engaged. They have a new health care provider. There is a lot of hope that that new provider will be able to respond better to some of the medical crises that are happening in that facility.
SUTTON: Your work is focused on what happens when people are incarcerated, even if they're awaiting trial. But things happen before that point, things that have a great impact on how many people go to jail or prison. There are decisions about what type of sentences they get, which facilities they will be in, which programs will be available to them, what health care will be available. How do you look at the things that happened before that point?
ARMSTRONG: That's a really good question. So you're right, my work really does focus behind bars. But obviously the things that happen before and after can really influence what it looks like behind bars. So one thing in particular is that our incarcerated population is rapidly aging. The average age of the incarcerated population is now like 40 and a half years old. What that means for the Department of Public Safety and Corrections is that they need to start developing experience and staffing for geriatric care.
SUTTON: As you look at our state Legislature and the types of things that have been done, before this administration, do you think that we were moving in a good direction? And as you look at the last few months, have we had reasonable changes from the reforms that took years to become law?
ARMSTRONG: I'll say that with the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which is a process that our state went through, like about 30 other states, there was federal money to study our systems and think about whether we are being smart on crime. Are we using our tax dollars effectively to increase public safety? Part of that process was saying, "OK, so if we reduce our prison population, if we really use it to target the types of behaviors that are violent, that have a deeper and more lasting impact on community, that means releasing folks who may be there for nonviolent offenses, releasing folks who might have had their first offense. With that savings, invest in reentry to reduce the potential that there's criminal behavior after they finish serving their sentences." Through that savings, we've created a much more robust reentry process here in the state. That helps with vocational training. That helps with identifying housing partners, that enrolls people on Medicaid, such that they are able to contribute to communities once released.
SUTTON: Do we look at carjackings, vehicle thefts and often random crimes as we should?
ARMSTRONG: My sense is that we are really afraid of random violence. And we overestimate the prevalence of random violence compared to violence. It's random, some person you don't know is going to jump out of the bushes type of thing. So I think, you know, I think that is something that we're very scared of, because we can't control it, we can't prevent it, we can't influence it. And I think that drives a lot of our decision-making.
SUTTON: Would I be accurate to say that your sabbatical will not be a vacation with sun and fun, that you'll be doing more of this research and work?
ARMSTRONG: Absolutely.
