Incarcerated people in the U.S. often face delayed or inadequate medical care,

making something as treatable as an infection deadly, and to varying degrees, all of us pay the price.

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, November 20th, 2025.

A USA Today exclusive investigation on prison deaths has revealed that many of them are entirely preventable.

What does that say about justice in America? USA Today investigative data reporter Austin Fast dug into data from

thousands of mistakenly published death reports as well as those he received after a freedom

of information lawsuit. He also spoke with families grappling with tragic losses that may

have been avoided to get the human side of the story.

Thank you so much for joining me, Austin.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

You led a USA Today investigation that looked at unredacted in-custody death reports from the U.S. Department of Justice.

How many years of data did you gain access to? And in terms of numbers,

what did you find? Also, how do prison debts compare to those outside the prison system?

So we were able to get records on about eight years of data, so from 2015 through

2023. And we had to compile a few different sources together

to get those all gathered together, and all together, it's about 49,000 deaths of people in

local jails, state prisons, and federal prisons.

So when I spoke with doctors, they were telling me that in a lot of cases,

prisoners have what they call comorbidities, so things, they struggle with chronic illnesses

that put them at a disadvantage compared to people outside of the prison system.

You shared a number of stories that I found disturbing, Austin, in your reporting. Can you tell me about

Rick Hall? Well, I should say first that I found there were about of all those deaths that I

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