Study On Jail Deaths Coming Next Month

San Diego County is about to get a new accounting of who dies in its jails, where, and under what conditions after more than 12 years of deaths. (timesofsandiego.com) The study covers seven detention facilities and is set to be presented to the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board, or CLERB, at its May meeting. County officials commissioned it after earlier audits and analyses found persistent problems in the jail system. (10news.com) CLERB began the project in May 2022 and hired Mountain-Whisper-Light, a statistics and data science contractor, to examine factors tied to in-custody deaths. A November 2024 letter from CLERB said the board had struggled to get complete data from the Sheriff’s Office and had turned to public records requests and outside counsel. (sandiegocounty.gov) The county’s jail death record has been under scrutiny for years. A California State Auditor report issued on February 3, 2022, said 185 people died in San Diego County jails from 2006 through 2020 and concluded the Sheriff’s Department had failed to adequately prevent and respond to those deaths. (auditor.ca.gov) That same spring, an independent study prepared for CLERB by Analytica Consulting compared San Diego with 11 other large California counties. The report said San Diego’s jails had unusually high levels of unexplained deaths, overdose or accidental deaths, and suicide risk when adjusted against expected mortality patterns. (sandiegocounty.gov) The new review is expected to go beyond county-to-county comparisons and look inside the system itself, including facility conditions and patterns across the seven jails. ABC 10News reported this week that the report examined 179 in-custody deaths over 12 years and flagged overcrowding, staffing shortages, and rising overdoses as safety concerns. (10news.com) The Sheriff’s Office says some of the report’s recommendations are already underway. In a statement posted April 21, the department said San Diego Central Jail accounts for more than 50% of county jail bookings and said it had increased staffing, expanded mental health and treatment programs, added doctors at booking facilities in 2025, and cut overdoses 65% between 2024 and 2025. (sdsheriff.gov) Oversight has also been part of the dispute. The state auditor said in 2022 that CLERB had failed to investigate nearly one-third of jail deaths over the prior 15 years, while CLERB said in 2024 that the Sheriff’s Office was slowing access to the records needed to complete its prevention study. (auditor.ca.gov) (cbs8.com) What comes next is more concrete than abstract: CLERB will hear the findings in May, and the county will have a fresh record to measure whether jail operations, medical care, and oversight have changed since the 2022 audit. (nbcsandiego.com)