Today, Explained - Death behind bars

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide is unexpectedly shining a light on the conditions in America’s jails. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I took the LSAT once, and now I'm the host of a podcast. So if you want to have better luck than I did, magosh.com, M-A-G-O-O-S-H.com. They want to help you with your test prep, and they're offering 15% off to Today Explained listeners right now. The promo code is today. In the North, senior reporter Vox Jeffrey Epstein is dead. What do we know? So there's a lot that we don't know, but there is a little that we know. He was found dead on Saturday morning in the jail in Manhattan where he was being held awaiting trial. He was facing up to 45 years in federal prison if he was convicted on the sex trafficking charges. And from reports

that we're getting so far, it appears that he had hanged himself. Can you tell me a little bit more about this facility he was being held, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan? Yeah, so it's in Lower Manhattan. It's actually kind of a notorious facility. It's also where infamous drug lord El Chapo Guzman was held. He referred to being held there as torture. So the conditions are notoriously not great. It's had problems with staffing. It's had problems with overcrowding. It's had problems with violence, with unsanitary conditions. So it's, you know, by all accounts, not a pleasant place to be. And it was in the same facility, I believe, that reports came out several weeks ago that Epstein had tried to end his life.

Is that right? That's correct. So a few weeks ago, jail authorities found Epstein injured in his cell. And it was a little unclear from initial reports whether he had tried to harm himself or maybe someone else had tried to harm him. Whatever the case, the authorities did put him on suicide watch. And so for a time, he was being specifically monitored to make sure he didn't try to harm himself. And do we know if he was still on suicide watch this weekend

when he took his own life? He'd actually been taken off suicide watch. This was, of course, a big question that a lot of people had following his death. You know, this is someone who had maybe tried to harm himself. You know, wasn't he on suicide watch? How could this happen? But in fact, a few days prior to his death, he'd been taken off suicide watch. You know, details about this are still kind of coming out, but it appears that he actually had been taken off at the request of his attorneys. Some sources were telling the Wall Street Journal that they, his lawyers, had actually asked him to

be taken off. But whatever the case, he wasn't on formal suicide watch when he died. Was there any kind of monitoring going on at the time he did this? Were there cameras? Were there guards coming by? Anything like that? He was supposed to be monitored. So even though he wasn't formally on suicide watch, jail policies would dictate that for a prisoner who'd been on suicide watch, there were a couple of safeguards that were supposed to be in place. He was supposed to have a cellmate. The theory there is that someone who may have been suicidal should have companionship, and it's also someone who can, frankly, just watch that person. But his cellmate had left the cell at the time of his death, apparently for some kind of appointment. Guards were also supposed to be checking on Epstein,

I believe, every half hour, but it appears they hadn't done so in the hours leading up to his death. And it's a little bit unclear why, but, you know, there are staffing problems. Some of the guards were supposed to be checking on him. You know, we're working overtime. One of them had been working overtime for four or five days in a row. So it's possible that some of these jail staffing issues may have contributed to the fact that he wasn't necessarily checked on the way he was supposed to be.

Attorney General William Barr appears to be very upset about this. We will get to the bottom of what happened, and there will be accountability. But let me assure you that this case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein. Any co-conspirators should not rest easy. The victims deserve justice, and they will get it. Do we know if there's going to be an investigation into how such a high profile prisoner was left to his own devices? Oh, yes. There's multiple investigations that are going to happen. The FBI is investigating. The attorney general has called on the Department

of Justice to investigate. Several members of Congress have called for a congressional investigation. And it's really like bipartisan calls for this. So everybody from Representative Ocasio-Cortez in New York, of course, is a Democrat, to Republicans in Florida. Really, everybody wants Congress to look into this. And this happened soon after documents were unsealed on Friday that connected a lot more people to Epstein, that sort of revealed a lot more details. What were in those documents? These documents had been really keenly anticipated for days. Everybody kind of knew that they were about to be released, and they had to do with a defamation case filed in 2015

by a woman named Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and she's claimed that Jeffrey Epstein kept her enslaved as a teenager and sexually abused her, along with other girls. All you do is obey. That's it. And eventually it led to, as a teenager and sexually abused her along with other girls. All you do is obey. That's it. And eventually it led to, well now we're gonna experiment and we're gonna try you with another guy and see how you go. So they sent me to an island with a professor and I basically had to do what I did for Jeffrey for him. So it's very private. It's the perfect world for a billionaire getting

away with what he was doing. There was so much anticipation around these documents. People were saying, oh, you know, they're going to implicate President Trump. They're going to implicate Bill Clinton. They're going to implicate every powerful man in the entire country. And they weren't quite as explosive as I think some people had expected. They did include some allegations by the woman in question that she was instructed by Ghislaine Maxwell, who is Epstein's sort of associate, to have sex with former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. There were some allegations in the documents concerning Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.

All of these prominent men have denied these allegations. It wasn't quite to the level of revelation that I think some people were expecting. It's more deepening the case around Epstein, deepening the case around this woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, and really showing, you know, the level and specificity of allegations that women have brought really against both these people. I guess considering the proximity to when these documents were released, though, it's no surprise that the internet was teeming with conspiracy theories since the news broke that he was dead. And then you couple the fact that he had connections to the current president,

former President Bill Clinton. Is more information going to come out about exactly how vast Epstein's operation was, what his connections were to these other men, or does his death mean that people will never know? You know, his death will complicate matters certainly to some degree. The most basic thing that will happen is obviously he can't stand trial anymore. So some of the women who say that he abused him, they're not going to have the chance to, you know, face him in court and they're not going to see him sentenced. But that doesn't mean that we can't, as the American public, still find out a lot about what happened, a lot about people who might have been involved other than Epstein and a lot about people who might have looked the other way. There's a criminal investigation in New York that's still ongoing, even though Epstein's

dead. The U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Jeffrey Berman, put out a statement on Saturday really letting everyone know that his office is going to keep working on the case. And he said, our investigation of the conduct charged in the indictment, which included a conspiracy count, remains ongoing. And it's significant that he kind of mentioned that conspiracy count. So when Epstein was arrested earlier this summer when he was charged, he was charged with sex trafficking. And then he was also charged with conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking. That conspiracy count implies there are other people involved. And so I wouldn't be surprised to see charges and certainly to see ongoing investigation in the coming months. Have you spoken to any of Epstein's accusers? Do you know how they feel right now? So I haven't spoken to his accusers personally, but I actually just this morning spoke with Lisa Bloom,

who is an attorney representing two women who say they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein. And I asked her, how are these women feeling right now, now that he's dead? And she said they had two very different reactions. One of them was really angry. She wanted to see Epstein brought to justice and it's not going to happen now. But the other one she said was actually relieved because even though Epstein was in jail, this woman was still really worried he could somehow hurt her.

And now she knows he can't hurt her anymore and he can't hurt anyone else. So there was, for that woman, just sort of a sense of relief in finding out about his death. While some of Jeffrey Epstein's accusers feel like they just lost their shot at justice, his death is unexpectedly shining a light on a totally different issue. The conditions in America's jails. That's in a minute on Today Explained. Thank you. Magoosh. Like M-A-G-O-O-S-H. Magoosh. How boring could it be, y'all? Magoosh offers a score improvement guarantee. If you don't improve, you'll get your money back.

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Magoosh. Andrew Cohn, editor at The Marshall Project covering criminal justice. How common are suicides in America's jails? Suicides in jail are the most common form of death in American jails, believe it or not. Part of the problem here is that jails and prisons do such a lousy job of reporting the information. The latest stats we have is that it is a huge problem, especially in jails, which are, of course, more transitory than prisons. And typically, jails don't have the sort of mental health infrastructures that you really need if you're going to prevent people who may be suicidal

from actually acting on their impulses. Do we have any numbers from any recent year? I think the most recent numbers are from 2014, believe it or not. There have been a number of media reports and academic studies done, but there are people who die basically every day in jails from suicides. It's an enormous problem at the state level, too. Alabama recently, in the past year or so, the enormity of the problem with suicides there has come to light only because of a lawsuit that's now in federal court.

The SPLC alleged the Department of Corrections is still not meeting the basic mental health needs of vulnerable prisoners despite a federal court order to take action. Just in the past week or so, there are new reports about the extent of the problem in Georgia at the local jail level and at the state level. The Georgia Department of Corrections is investigating an inmate's death at Valdosta State Prison. This is the second inmate death at Valdosta State Prison in the past two months. And it obviously, as we saw over the weekend, is a problem as well in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which has a terrible track record of dealing with suicidal prisoners. Do you have any numbers from 2014, Andrew? The number in jails, anyway, was somewhere between 350 and 400, which is a lot.

Why don't we have up-to-date numbers? I think it's for the same reason that we don't really have adequate official numbers about police shootings. The incentives are just not there. I'm sure that every jail official in a local jail knows precisely how many men and women have committed suicide in a particular facility, but it's embarrassing information, right? It doesn't make anyone look good. A lot of the reporting of these sorts of events is voluntary, and so you get numbers that are late in coming. And is it happening in one place more than another?

Like we have this Epstein case where it's happening in the heart of Manhattan. Is it also happening in rural Kansas and prisons there? It is. It's happening all over the country. I remember the story in Ohio where this really, truly hated serial rapist was basically left to kill himself. For 10 miserable years, they survived three young women summoning every ounce of strength in that house of horrors. But Ariel Castro lasted just one month and one day in prison before apparently taking his own life. And then they said, oh, geez, we better, this doesn't look good. Everyone was, you know, expecting this man to live to be tried, and now he's dead, and we're

going to basically fudge the records. A report released today also says two prison guards falsified logs documenting their observation of Castro in the hours before he killed himself. The report says video indicates that guards failed to check on Castro at least eight times before he died. You know, that's the sort of attitude that should never happen. There was a case of a young man named Billy Slagle, I'll never forget, who committed suicide

hours before prosecutors in his case found evidence that might have exonerated him. Records on a computerized logbook may have been falsified on August 4th, the night Billy Slagle killed himself on death row in the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. It was almost like a Shakespearean tragedy, where had he held on for a few more days, might have become aware of the good news, essentially, and might have at some point been released from prison. So, yes, it is a nationwide problem. And I'm not sure that there are many jurisdictions that have figured out a way to solve it. I remember when Whitey Bulger showed up to his prison, I think in West Virginia, and he was there for like 12 hours before he was brutally beaten and so quickly executed, essentially. But then I read articles, you know, where people had spoken to those affected by his crimes in Boston and outside Boston, and they were happy.

And I just wonder, is there a sense that as a society, as a country, we just don't really care what written in the past decade or so about American exceptionalism in terms of punitive feelings, punishment. What happened to Whitey Bulger is also part of the same problem here. It was also a federal penitentiary. It was also a scenario where prison officials knew or should have known that there could be trouble. It was a penitentiary, I think in West Virginia, right? That was notorious for problems. And there has been sort of a scandal in the wake of it. I think the same thing is going to happen here.

You have a lot of the same elements. But I don't think that the Bureau of Prisons suddenly, as a result of this episode, is going to turn around and spend a ton of money making sure that mental health treatment is better for inmates or that, you know, the prisons are fully staffed and operational, although that should happen. I think that there's going to be an investigation and I think maybe a head or two is going to roll. Somebody's going to get fired or resigned and then you're going to sort of move on with life. What's standing in the way of actually fixing this?

Well, it seems to me that if there were the political will to ensure the safety of prisoners, whether they're high-profile prisoners like Jeffrey Epstein or prisoners that no one is going to hear about or ever heard of, then you make sure that your jails are fully staffed, that your prisons are fully staffed, that the mental health professionals who are in charge of these prisoners and evaluating their mental health are adequately paid and compensated, that there are enough of them so that when there is a suicide that should not take place, the guards who fail to monitor properly are held accountable. If those things

were to happen, then you wouldn't have the hundreds of inmate suicides that you have in prisons and local jails across the country. But it has been that way, even as people have become more familiar with the problem. It seems to me that there just isn't the political will at this point to solve it. Part of that, I think, is Americans are particularly punitive when it comes to inmates. Part of it, I think, is an attitude among prison staff and jail staff of animosity towards inmates. And part of it is just the nature of politics and incarceration, which even though it's maybe turning around a little bit in the past couple of years, still is as regressive as it has been

for quite some time. Do you think there ever will be that political will in America to take better care of its inmates to make sure they serve full terms instead of being murdered or ending their own lives? I don't know. I think one of the open questions here going forward is whether this death, which really has shocked people into understanding more about how prisons and jails really operate, whether it is enough to jolt Congress into demanding that the Bureau of Prisons does a better job, and whether it's enough to jolt local jails into using more of the funding they get to prevent these sorts of things from happening. It would seem like an incredible irony if the upshot of Jeffrey Epstein's case into using more of the funding they get to prevent these sorts of things from happening. It would seem like an incredible irony if the upshot of Jeffrey Epstein's case and death and life

is improving prison conditions across America. I agree. And I am not sure it's going to make a difference in the end. You know, one of the things that I find fascinating about the reaction to his death is the reaction by the attorney general. I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here. You know, right out of Casablanca on Monday, you know, declared that he was shocked, shocked that this stuff was happening.

I was appalled, and indeed the whole department was, and frankly, angry, to learn of the MCC's failure to adequately secure this prisoner. We are now learning of serious irregularities at this facility that are deeply concerning and demand a thorough investigation. If he's paid any attention to congressional testimony over the past decade or to hundreds of news articles about the problem, then he would have known that the Bureau of Prisons has a terrible morale problem. It has a terrible problem of understaffing. It has a terrible problem of people swallowed up in overtime. This should not be news to the Attorney General.

If it is news to the Attorney General, then he's been negligent as well. Andrew Cohn is a senior editor at the Marshall Project and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. I'm Sean Rottman's firm. This is Today Explained. Before we go, just a reminder that Magoosh would like to help you with your upcoming standardized test. They've got online test prep that provides you with the tools you need to get a great score, study schedules, up-to-date practice questions, video lessons, support from expert tutors. Check it out at Magoosh.com, M-A-G-O-O-S-H.

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