Officials point to annual booking data rather than average daily population
When it comes to calculating the suicide rate of jail inmates, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department prefers a different approach than one widely used by experts, oversight groups and federal agencies such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
A 2018 consultant’s report for the department found the formula used to calculate suicide rates should, among other things, be adjusted to account for a jail system’s racial makeup, since young white men are more likely to commit suicide. It also found that the number of inmates passing through a jail should be taken into consideration for high turnover facilities like San Diego’s.
Kelly Davis, Jeff McDonald discuss the investigation on San Diego News Fix
The more widely used method for calculating suicide rates divides the number of suicides by a jail system’s average daily population, then multiplies the result by 100,000 for a rate per 100,000 inmates.
Between 2009 and 2018, data show San Diego County jails averaged 3.9 inmate suicides per year and held, on average, 5,212 inmates a day. Using the federal standard, this results in an annual suicide rate of 74.8 per 100,000, the highest among California’s six largest jail systems.
Orange County jails, by comparison, averaged 0.9 suicides per year among 5,929 inmates, for a rate of 15.2. Los Angeles County, with 17,061 inmates a day, had a rate of 25.8.
When asked about its suicide rate, the Sheriff’s Department pointed to a 2018 report by statistician Colleen Kelly, who was hired to respond to an investigation into inmate suicides by oversight group Disability Rights California. Kelly is a professor at San Diego State University and co-founder of the college’s statistical consulting center.
The investigation Kelly was responding to found, “San Diego County’s inmate suicide rate has been staggeringly high compared with national, statewide and local data.”
According to Kelly’s report, the federal approach fails to account for a jail’s high inmate turnover, racial differences among inmate populations or, in San Diego’s case, the fact that it books more inmates — and more white inmates — annually than most large California jail systems.
When these things are taken into account, Kelly argues, San Diego is no longer an outlier. In the report, Kelly analyzed suicide and arrest records of the 10 largest jails in the state from 2010 through 2017.
She noted that San Diego had the highest percentage of white inmates, about 46 percent, among those jail systems. Los Angeles had the lowest, with white inmates accounting for 21 percent of the jail population.
“Because Caucasians, African Americans and Hispanics have drastically different suicide rates, the racial distribution of each jail system should be accounted for in the comparison,” Kelly wrote.
Western U.S. data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show the suicide rate for white men age 20 and above was 41 per 100,000 in 2017, the most recent year available. The rate among black men was 18 and among Hispanic men it was 16.
Kelly also argued that the average length of stay for each inmate should be taken into account, though it’s not clear whether or how her report might have done so.
According to Kelly’s report, “When resident suicide rates are standardized, a San Diego Jail inmate is even less likely to die by suicide than the average San Diego resident.”
The report does not provide sufficient methodology to verify the claim.
The Union-Tribune ran several models using arrest, suicide and demographic data to account for the age, gender, ethnicity and length-of-incarceration specific to San Diego. These models seemed to show the jails’ suicides exceeding the expected number based on those factors.
Kelly, who has been retained as an expert for San Diego County in three lawsuits involving inmate suicides, did not respond to several requests for help understanding her methodology.
“Our challenge is identifying that potentially suicidal person and getting him in the proper housing, and even then it’s still challenging. If you don’t get them in the proper housing, and that person’s said [I’m going to kill myself], they’re going to find a way. You’ve heard of some of the terrible ways people find [to kill themselves]. They’ve drowned themselves in the toilet.”
— Sheriff Bill Gore, to Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board
To support her approach, Kelly pointed in her study to a 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics report that said using booking numbers would yield a “more appropriate comparison” than the average daily population.
Reports from the bureau in all subsequent years dropped any reference to the booking numbers approach, saying the average daily population is the appropriate measure.
E. Ann Carson, acting chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Corrections Unit, told the Union-Tribune that using the average daily population “takes into account the high turnover rate in jails, as well as the relatively short average length of stay.”
Counting the total number of admissions “would underestimate the mortality rate,” Carson said by email.
California state prison psychologist Robert Canning said the field of correctional suicidology still relies on daily population averages.
“The courts have also relied upon ADP calculations … when making judgments about liability in jails and prisons,” he said in a court filing in a lawsuit against the county.
The Sheriff’s Department declined to disclose the cost of Kelly’s study.
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