Seventy-five people have died in LA County jails since the start of 2023.

How are people dying? Los Angeles County has not yet publicly issued causes of death for everyone who has died in county jails in recent months. However, even once autopsy reports are finalized, they don’t tell the whole story: when the coroner rules that a death is the result of “natural causes,” jail conditions can still be to blame. Researchers ...

The U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect people from egregious punishment—but that right is often violated.

California forced incarcerated people to sleep on bunks in communal areas, like the ones pictured here in California State Prison-Lancaster. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the dangerous conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons constituted “cruel and unusual” punishment. At the start of the century, California prisons were packed to more th ...