New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman says she's discovered dozens of cases where people in county jails across the U.S. have died of starvation, dehydration, or related medical crises. Many were people with mental health issues arrested for minor crimes who languished behind bars without treatment, unable to make bail.Also, we remember renowned jazz critic and Terry Gross' husband, Francis Davis.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Nobody wants to go to jail or see a loved one taken there. They're crowded, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. But we generally expect that the incarcerated will get the basics—a bed and toilet, three meals a day, and health care.
But our guest, New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman, begins her latest article with the story of a woman in her 60s who died of protein calorie malnutrition, the apparent result of prolonged starvation during her four-month stay at a Tucson, Arizona jail. Stillman finds that starving in jail is far more common than you might think.
The victims are often mentally ill people who were arrested for minor crimes and then languish behind bars, untreated and unable to make bail. Lawyers and activists say the problem has increased with the practice of counties granting contracts to private companies to provide health care to the incarcerated.
Stillman interviewed many surviving relatives and reviewed countless records of disturbing cases for her article titled Starved in Jail. In addition to her work for The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman teaches journalism at Yale, where she also runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab.
Stillman won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her article about the little-known but widely used legal doctrine of felony murder. That's a subject we'll get to a little later. Well, Sarah Stillman, welcome to Fresh Air. You open your story about starvation with the case of Mary Faith Casey, a woman in her 60s who's arrested—
and taken to a county jail after something that I guess was a parole violation, technically a failure to register her address, something relatively minor. Before we get to what happened there, just tell us something about her life before she entered the Pima County Jail.
Well, Mary, like many of the people I wrote about for this piece, was a very vibrant and very loved person. She had a life with two kids who she loved dearly. She was always the kind of very nurturing mother who would sew their Halloween costumes by hand. And at some point as she got older, she developed some serious mental health issues and slid into addiction.
I think it's a story that many, many people can relate to. And shockingly, by the time she was in her 60s, she often found herself unhoused. And she actually wound up in the Pima County Jail because of a probation violation tied essentially to being unhoused because she had to register her address and she didn't have one.
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