How it’s possible to starve to death in a U.S. jail

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mentally ill inmates are at risk of neglect, dehydration – even starvation. New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the four-fold increase since the 1980s of people in jail awaiting trial, the increasingly outsized population of mentally unwell people lacking proper treatment, and the alarming rise in jail deaths that could’ve been prevented with better supervision. Her article is “Starved in Jail.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hearing that someone starved to death in an American jail, not like in colonial times, but in this decade, sounds so weird and deeply disturbing that it triggers a kind of curiosity. How is that even possible?
0:23.4	When New Yorker's staff writer Sarah Stillman learned about a woman named Mary, who died in Tucson in
0:28.2	2022 after being jailed for sleeping in a public place, she decided she had to investigate.
0:34.2	What she discovered was legitimately shocking. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd.
0:40.8	Mary was a person with a family who loved her, who had once led a normal, even privileged life.
0:46.3	A long struggle with severe mental illness caused her to end up unhoused and therefore a target for arrest whose health was neglected by jail medical staff.
0:55.1	It is a terrible story, but that is not the part that's so hard to get your head around.
0:59.6	The real shock here is that Sarah Stillman learned that Mary's case is not an isolated tragedy.
1:05.7	Her article about what she uncovered is titled Starved in Jail.
1:09.3	Sarah, welcome to think.
1:12.6	Thank you so much for having me on the show. Let's start with Mary's story. You learned that, you know, her family said she had once
1:18.2	been a person who could easily access delight, which is such a wonderful way to describe a person.
1:24.1	Her life had not always been miserable. Yeah, you know, I got to spend time with Mary's
1:29.5	two kids who Mary had loved tremendously. She was the kind of mom who would, like, sew their
1:34.3	Halloween costumes by hand and was very involved and very affectionate and a lot of the time
1:41.4	very mentally stable, but she, by the time the kids were in their teenage years,
1:46.6	she was really struggling with serious mental health issues. I think it's the kind of thing
1:50.4	that so many families relate to, themes of addiction and themes of mental health crisis. So,
1:57.4	you know, as she got older, that became more severe. And ultimately, she wound up actually
2:02.9	kind of cycling in and out of jails and spending time unhoused and moving to Arizona.
2:08.8	When Mary herself was still a kid and a teenager, her parents divorced. Her mother had a hard
2:14.9	time with bipolar disorder. But her sister said Mary was the one back then who kind of fought to keep everybody together as a family.
	...

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