Demography of Health and Aging Seminar: Ruth Wygle, Predoctoral Student, Duke Department of Sociology, presents, "Variation in mortality risk while incarcerated by confinement facility type and hold status"

Jail leasing is the practice by which states enter into contractual agreements with local governments and rent beds in jails to house individuals who would normally be confined in state-operated prisons. In this paper, I examine differences in mortality risk for individuals experiencing incarceration in jails as the result of a leasing agreement compared to the broader jail and prison populations. I do so by describing the deaths of individuals from the jail, prison and leasing population in the US between 2013 and 2019, and calculating the crude and standardized mortality rates for these populations. I find a lower mortality risk for the leasing population compared to the prison population and the general jail population, largely driven by the fact that individuals subjected to leasing agreements are simultaneously insulated from the long sentences experienced by the prison population and from the deaths of despair experienced by the unconvicted jail population.