In 2015, we noticed the rising number of deaths in the Escambia County Jail since the county had taken control of the facility and since the jail explosion. From Nov. 1, 2014, to Nov. 24, 2015, Escambia County Jail had six deaths in its county jail, three of which were suicides.
- No one seemed to care, other than the families. We began digging and found that around 80 percent of all local jails nationwide had no deaths in a year, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Less than 7% have two or more deaths.
- Then, we looked at Florida and found that if a death happened in a city or county jail in Florida in 2015, there is a one-in-ten chance it will happen in Escambia County.
We published the statistics on Nov. 24, 2015 on the blog. We followed it with a more complete report in the Inweekly on Dec. 3, 2015. The following day, County Administrator Jack Brown fired his Director of Corrections, Mike Tidwell. He placed the jail command, community corrections and road prison staff under Assistant County Administrator Chip Simmons.
I interviewed Commissioner Doug Underhill on “Pensacola Speaks.”
“We haven’t heard a good news story out of our jail since the day the county took it over,” said Underhill. “Quite frankly, we are desperately in need of a new course of action because the course of action we’ve been on since April (2014), just is not working.”
The commissioner pointed that nationally we have talked mental seriously. The problem has been pushed onto the criminal justice system.
“We got exactly what you’re going to expect when you decide to simply ignore a problem,” he said. “The Escambia County jail is, and for a long time has been, a microcosm of all of these national problems. We just don’t have anything that we can really hang our hat on as something we’re doing right with regard to the jail.”
- Today: The sources we used to track jail deaths no longer exist online. In reviewing news reports, it appears the Escambia County Jail has averaged on jail death annually over the past several years.
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