WASHINGTON, D.C. — Belinda L. Maley’s son, Matthew Loflin, died in 2014 within nearly three months at the Chatham County Detention Center in Savannah.

Loflin died of heart failure after jail staff refused to take him to a hospital for medical care after weeks of suffering from cardiomyopathy, Maley said.

“I need to get to a hospital … I’ve been coughing up blood. … My feet are swollen … I’m gonna die in here,” Loflin could be heard telling his mother on their last recorded jail phone call, which was played during the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Sept. 20 hearing.

The committee is investigating deaths in U.S. prisons and jails and found that nearly 1,000 deaths were unreported by the Department of Justice in 2021 alone, shedding more light on the flawed prison and jail system in the U.S.

Approximately 20% of deaths in custody were pre-trial deaths, the Committee found. Loflin was in jail awaiting trial for drug charges at the time.

“Matthew was never given any treatment. The for-profit medical provider had no intentions of treating him because cardiology appointments outside of the jail would cut into their profit margin. One of his jailers called his pain and anguish ‘fussy,’” Maley said.

Her last visit with her son was to take him off of life support where he was still handcuffed to an ICU bed and under 24/7 supervision by a corrections officer, she recalled.

“No one … not the health provider, not the infirmary staff, the sheriff’s office or the district attorney was willing to help,” Maley said. “They did take time to exact one last indignity upon Matthew before his death, issuing him a personal recognizance bond after he was brain dead so his death would not count as an in-custody death.”

Vanessa Fano shared the story of her brother, Jonathan Fano hung himself in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in Louisiana in 2017.

He suffered from bipolar disorder and depression and had been arrested after a mental episode. Vanessa said he never received a mental evaluation, despite the family being told he was getting the care he needed.

“When we finally saw his lifeless body, the first time in 10 weeks, he was handcuffed to an intensive care unit bed,” Vanessa said. “It was only then we realized how wrong we were to place our trust in this system, which told us there was no fault after their own internal investigation of Jonathan’s death. It is only through our own insistence over the past five years that we have come to learn how hard Jonathan tried to receive help. How belittled he was. How no one believed him. How so many other people have died in the same jail under the same conditions.”

Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, oversees a project with her students that collects, publishes and analyzes deaths in custody in Louisiana prisons, jails and detention centers. She commented on the difficulty of receiving information regarding inmate deaths.

“It’s a semester-long project because they have they filed a public records request but often there is not a response under the public records law of Louisiana so they have to constantly go after these facilities by email by phone call,” Armstrong explained. “Jails have to report to the local coroners, and unless you know to file a public records request that’s difficult to get. When we do file a public records request with the coroners, they often don’t categorize them as in-custody deaths so they are difficult for the coroner themselves to identify and then respond. What we do is we file directly to the administrator of that facility and what we ask for is the information that they reported to the federal government.”

Chaired by Georgia U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff, the Committee found that at least 341 missing and potentially reportable prison deaths were disclosed on states’ public websites but were not collected by the DOJ in 2021; At least 649 missing arrest deaths were reported in a public database maintained by a nonprofit civil rights organization, but were not collected by BJA.

“This information is critical to improve transparency in prisons and jails, identifying trends in custodial deaths that may warrant corrective action — such as failure to provide adequate medical care, mental health services, or safeguard prisoners from violence — and identifying specific facilities with outlying death rates,” the committee report states.

The committee hearing keyed in on failures in implementing and adhering to the Death in Custody Reporting Act, which was reauthorized by Congress in 2013. It requires states that accept certain federal funding to report to the DOJ who is dying in prisons and jails and the circumstances surrounding the deaths.

DOJ has failed to report any death in custody data since 2019.

“We can reveal that despite a clear charge from Congress to determine who is dying in prisons and jails across the country, where they are dying, and why they are dying, the Department of Justice is failing to do so,” Ossoff said. “This failure undermines efforts to address the urgent humanitarian crisis ongoing behind bars across the country.”

The committee investigation found that not only has DOJ failed to adequately collect data, but also the vast majority of death in custody information they have collected from the states in recent years has been incomplete, with at least 40% not including a description of the circumstances surrounding the deaths.

DOJ’s failure to implement DRCA and to publish data is a missed opportunity to prevent avoidable deaths, Ossoff said.

“We are here today because what the United States is allowing to happen on our watch in prisons, jails and detention centers nationwide is a moral disgrace,” Ossoff said. “As federal legislators serving on the nation’s pre-eminent investigative panel, it is our obligation to investigate the federal government’s complicity in this disgrace.”

Ossoff continued: “It’s our obligation to ask what tools the Department of Justice is using to protect the constitutional rights of the incarcerated — to hold DOJ accountable when it fails to use those tools — and to furnish better, more powerful tools with which the Department can defend civil rights and civil liberties.”

Maureen A. Henneberg, deputy assistant attorney general for operations and management, Office of Justice Programs for the DOJ, endured intense questioning and scrutiny for the failure of the DOJ to accurately collect data.

Henneberg said the DOJ stopped publishing the data due to significant underreporting from the states, thus providing the data would be misleading and “not provide a full picture of what’s happening in custody.”

“We are faced with a statute that provided that the states collect the data and we were are following that in that approach states directly being the central room reporters we have now proposed legislative fixes,” Henneberg said. “The department is committed to fixing this. This current administration, this department is focusing on fixing what we have observed the last couple of years with DRCA reporting.”

DCRA also required a report to be submitted to Congress in 2016 to determine how the information found could be used to reduce deaths in custody. Henneberg said that report won’t be complete until 2024.

In July, the committee held a hearing focused on alleged corruption, abuse and misconduct at the U.S. Penitentiary Atlanta.

The federal prison administration’s failures likely contributed to the loss of life, jeopardized the health and safety of inmates and staff, and undermined inmates’ civil rights, Ossoff said during that hearing.

Former employees of the prison recalled the lack of security measures being enforced and the ease of contraband and drugs entering the facility. Reports have revealed that many of the inmates that died by suicide were on drugs at the time.