And this is despite reforms enacted by the General Assembly to hold jails more accountable for how they treat their prisoners. 

In fact, the accountability effort might be failing.

The legislature authorized fresh investigative authority after Jamycheal Mitchell, a mentally ill inmate, starved to death in his own waste in the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in 2015.

The horrendous circumstances of that death galvanized a bipartisan effort to hold jails responsible for mistreatment, after several state entities said they didn’t investigate the case because they didn’t think state law gave them the right to do so.

The General Assembly sought to correct that.

But it’s not just the number of deaths that raises questions; in populations ranging into the tens of thousands, when all jails are at full capacity, some deaths will naturally occur — and may be even more likely among a group of people who likely did not receive adequate health care over much of their lives.

No, what causes concern is the fact that the responsible agency is not releasing information about its investigations.  

Under the new legislation, authority for overseeing investigations was handed over to the Board of Corrections, a panel of citizens appointed by the governor. The Board of Corrections already is in charge of jails, so the addition of investigative authority essentially means that the board is granted the power of self-policing. That creates the potential for conflict of interest.

We noted that possibility when the legislation was being considered.

The Office of the State Inspector General was another contender for investigative authority over the jails. But critics of that plan argued that an “outsider” like OSIG wouldn’t have the background knowledge necessary to conduct effective investigations.

“An insider might have more expert knowledge of jail operations — but an outsider may be precisely what is needed in a controversial or convoluted case,” we said. “An outsider would see the situation from a fresh angle. An outsider would be unbound by the limiting assumptions and expectations that can thrive within even the best organizations.”

But the insider faction won, and investigative authority was handed to the Board of Corrections.

The board hired two part-time employees, an investigator and an administrative aide. As of this writing, the investigator has closed 17 cases dating back to July of last year, with some 36 cases still pending. In each case, all the public gets is a briefly worded cause of death — ranging from “natural causes” to “unknown causes,” from “suicide” to “murder,” to the terse and non-committal “death in custody.”

If Jamycheal Mitchell’s case were to be investigated today, would we simply hear that he had “died in custody”?

None of this tells the public if the jails were fully or partially at fault in any of these deaths.

None of this tells the public what steps are being taken to prevent further deaths.

None of this tells the public whether the investigations are adequate or inadequate.

That is not necessarily a criticism of the investigator, but it is a criticism of the board’s silence.

When the General Assembly passed legislation to improve accountability in jail deaths, we’re pretty sure they did not have this scenario in mind. When agencies enforce secrecy, accountability shrivels.