This is part 1 of a series examining what’s driving the deadliest period in Oregon Department of Corrections’ modern history
An average of 49 prisoners died each year in Oregon’s state prisons since 2020, a 45% increase over the 33.8 annual deaths reported in the previous 20 years, despite a decreasing prison population.
Throughout a 20-year span from 2000 through 2019, annual deaths in Oregon’s prisons never exceeded 47, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections, or ODOC. Prisoner deaths have now matched or exceeded that previous high in each of the last four years — with at least 50 prisoners dying in 2020 and 2021. ODOC reported 52 in-custody prisoner deaths in 2021, which remains the deadliest year in recent record.
At least 12 prisoners died in ODOC custody this year, as of May 10, according to ODOC press releases.
Advocates say poor health care and a lack of transparency and accountability paired with COVID-19 and an aging prison population likely converge to fuel the deadliest period in ODOC’s modern history. While a number of highly educated guesses create a matrix of contributing factors, ODOC furnished a cause of death in less than half of in-custody deaths since 2020 and has a reputation for opacity.
ODOC didn’t have an explanation for the increase in deaths over the last four years when asked by Street Roots, instead providing the same language ODOC includes in press releases announcing prisoner deaths.
“Oregon Department of Corrections takes all in-custody deaths seriously,” Amber Campbell, ODOC communications manager, told Street Roots when asked about the increase in deaths. “The agency is responsible for the care and custody of approximately 12,000 individuals who are incarcerated in 12 institutions across the state. In-custody deaths are reported to and investigated by the Oregon State Police, and the State Medical Examiner determines cause of death.”
Health care system in the system
ODOC’s treatment of prisoners spawned increasing outcry dating back to 2020, when a high rate of COVID cases and deaths prompted a class-action lawsuit alleging the state failed to adequately protect prisoners. ODOC reported 52 prisoners died with COVID before it stopped tracking cases and deaths in January 2023. That suit is headed to a federal court in the coming years.
Most recently, The Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Oregon’s only women-only prison, faced scrutiny in a Gender Informed Practices Assessment for harassment of prisoners, trauma-inducing design and practices, under-resourcing by ODOC and discrimination.
It’s not just advocates, prisoners and their attorneys who believe ODOC’s health care system has problems.
A 2022 Oregon Legislature Joint Task Force on Corrections Medical Care, reported on by Street Roots in 2022, found prisoners, termed as “adults in custody” or AIC by ODOC, face both an elevated risk of serious health conditions and more barriers to adequate treatment due to gender, race, age and socioeconomic status.
“These factors all combine to make the AIC population poorer, older, and sicker,” the report found. “Incarceration has also been shown to contribute to worsening health of individuals, families, and communities. AIC are more likely to have high blood pressure, asthma, cancer, and arthritis. AIC are also more likely to have or acquire infectious diseases, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B and C, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.”
State Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-33, a medical doctor, served on the task force and sponsored the bill creating it. Despite no longer serving on House committees working on corrections policies or overseeing ODOC, Dexter said she’s pushed for legislation to address the state’s inadequate prison health care system.
“As a physician, I understand that AIC’s constitutional right to access quality, community-standard healthcare has unfortunately not yet been fully realized in Oregon,” Dexter told Street Roots on May 15. “It’s clear that more needs to be done to meet the needs of AICs and I am especially concerned about AICs access to medically assisted treatment for opioid use disorder.”
Juan Chavez, Oregon Justice Resource Center’s Civil Rights Project director and attorney, said incarceration patterns play a role in the increasing number of deaths, highlighting Oregon’s aging prison population amid a national trend.
“Oregon is notorious for having a particularly aged population of prisoners,” Chavez said, attributing it to mandatory minimum sentencing laws like Measure 11, which were softened since passed in the 1990s. “An aging prison population is also just the case nationally. But I know Oregon has consistently been in the top 10 for incarcerating old people.
“That’s kind of the baseline of medical vulnerability.”
That heightened rate of medical vulnerability combines with ODOC’s inadequate health care system to create a deadly environment, according to Chavez, an attorney representing prisoners in the COVID class-action suit.
“I think they’re killing people by not treating them effectively,” Chavez said. “I think they’re killing people by not diagnosing people correctly and not sending them out for follow-up care or sending them out to get evaluated by an actual practitioner specialist.”
ODOC had 17 physicians on staff in 2022 — roughly one doctor for every 700 prisoners, or fewer than two per state prison — according to state salary records. The lack of a robust in-house medical system necessitates prisoners receiving care from outside specialists, but ODOC committees responsible for approving that outside care are slow-moving.
After a committee approves a prisoner for outside care, ODOC still averages nearly a month to schedule the appointment, according to the 2022 report on corrections medical care.
“If a (committee) approves provision of services requiring coordination with outside providers or facilities, it takes an average of 25 days for a staff member to schedule with an outside provider; schedule timing is influenced by the acuity of the need for services, staffing and provider availability, and AIC classification level,” the report found.
Delayed timelines for scheduling and care are a best-case scenario after a referral for outside care arrives before a committee. ODOC has been sued over the committees a number of times, specifically due to allegations the committees improperly denied care. The state actually incentivizes committees to minimize outside care, applying a “key performance measure” targeting “1% or less of health care encounters to occur offsite.”
Chavez said complaints about ODOC’s health care system are common and illuminate grave realities.
“Bar none, calls about inadequate medical care outnumber every other problem I hear in prisons, and there are plenty of other problems in prisons,” Chavez said. “But, most fundamentally, people are losing body parts and organs and their sanity to the medical care there. I would not be surprised that that is the most significant contributing factor to high rates of deaths in Oregon’s prisons.”
Chavez, Dexter and others in the know can point to specific issues or shortcomings and offer certainty that ODOC’s health care is sub-par, but they often revert to generalities and probabilities when describing the cause or causes of the increased death rate. This is a side effect of ODOC’s lack of transparency.
Shrouded in mystery
Federal law requires ODOC to provide quarterly prison death reports to the Oregon Legislature with causes of death, but it doesn’t mean ODOC actually determines and provides the cause of death in those reports.
Street Roots reviewed five quarterly reports spanning 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 and found of the 55 deaths covered in those reports, ODOC failed to list a cause in 63.6% of deaths. This time span is not an outlier.
Street Roots conducted a similar analysis of 10 quarterly reports spanning 2020, 2021 and the first two quarters of 2022 in December 2022 and found ODOC failed to list a cause in 63.4% of deaths in that timeframe.
“I think it is consistent with a general lack of transparency that comes out of the Department of Corrections,” Chavez told Street Roots in 2022. “And, I think, an attitude that nobody should be really checking in on their business … I think the public deserves to know if there has been anything questionable or not.”
ODOC’s publicly available COVID data contains some curiosities the department has been unable to explain as of May 24 since first questioned by Street Roots on May 8.
The department recorded 6,153 confirmed prisoner cases of COVID, 5,915 confirmed recoveries and 52 deaths between 2020 and when it publicly stopped tracking COVID among prisoners in January 2023. Those statistics leave 186 positive cases resulting in neither a confirmed recovery or a death.
What of the 186 prisoners who tested positive without confirmed recovery who aren’t among the 52 confirmed COVID deaths? ODOC isn’t sure, and it will take some time to figure it out, according to Campbell.
“It would take a great deal of time to conduct the necessary research to verify the timing of the specific data, when it started being tracked, when it stopped being tracked and other details relating to this,” Campbell reiterated May 24 when offered another chance to explain the difference before publishing.
While a lot of ODOC’s transparency woes can be attributed to a lack of recorded information in reference to COVID data and causes of prisoner deaths, some former employees allege department leadership was intentionally opaque or dishonest at times.
Recent successful lawsuits allege ODOC knowingly provided false information to the Legislature under Colette Peters and Heidi Steward’s leadership and retaliated against staff who tried to address the discrepancies. Peters was ODOC’s director for a decade until becoming the Federal Bureau of Prisons director in August 2022. Steward served as deputy director beginning April 1, 2019 and acting director after Peters left. Gov. Tina Kotek appointed former Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese to run the department last November.
Gina Raney-Eatherly, a former top data analyst for the department, and Merilee Nowak, who worked under Raney-Eatherly, successfully sued the state in 2020. The former employees said Peters and Steward knowingly lied during testimony before the Oregon Legislature in early 2019, overstating the prevalence of prisoners with addiction and understating the department’s capability to provide lawmakers with requested data. ODOC leadership misrepresented both situations in an effort to secure more funding, according to the complaint.
ODOC leadership subjected Raney-Eatherly and Nowak to a pattern of retaliation for failing to properly support the ruses and several other efforts to misrepresent data to lawmakers and grantmakers throughout 2019, according to the complaint. After demotions, negative statements about performance and behavior, and an inadequate workload, Raney-Eatherly filed suit against the state in December 2019.
ODOC notified Raney-Eatherly, Nowak and other employees of potential layoffs in March 2020. Nowak filed suit against the state April 14, 2020. Peters laid off both workers April 28, 2020.
A jury awarded the women over $2.4 million in damages in April 2023 and ordered the state to pay over $739,000 in court and attorney fees later that year.
The state also settled with a former assistant director of ODOC’s Correctional Services Division, Nathaline Frener, to the tune of $950,000 in a retaliation suit in February after Peters fired Frener on July 29, 2022. Frener alleged she was terminated in part because she wouldn’t participate in the plot to retaliate against Raney-Eatherly and because she spoke up against a plan encouraging ODOC workers to claim a religious exemption to avoid the state’s COVID vaccine mandate for its workers.
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This article appears in May 29, 2024.