Recent reports of the death of an inmate in the Lowndes County Jail have a number of citizens questioning the causes and numbers of deaths that have occurred at the jail in the last several years.They found that the number of deaths per inmate population per year in Lowndes County was similar to those for Fulton County and DeKalb County. However, there’s a lot more context that the VDT did not include.
Perhaps for reasons of space, the VDT did not include a list of inmate deaths. Here is George Rhynes’ attempt at compiling a complete list of jail deaths in Lowndes County, 1994-2009.
More generally, beyond comparisons with Atlanta counties, how do Lowndes County inmate populations compare with those elsewhere? That’s a longer story for another post.