--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about the unexpected consequences of Jeffrey Epstein's death. His passing has brought attention to the conditions in America's jails. I'm joined by Anna North, senior reporter at Vox. Anna, thanks for being here.
--:-- Anna North: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's start with what we know about Epstein's death. He was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. He was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges that could have landed him up to 45 years in federal prison.
--:-- Anna North: That's right. And from reports we're getting, it appears he had hanged himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The facility where he was being held is notorious for its poor conditions. Can you tell me a little bit more about it?
--:-- Anna North: Yeah, so it's in lower Manhattan. It's actually kind of a notorious facility. It's also where infamous drug lord El Chapo Guzman was held. He referred to being held there as torture. So the conditions are notoriously not great. It's had problems with staffing. It's had problems with overcrowding. It's had problems with violence, with unsanitary conditions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it was in the same facility that reports came out several weeks ago that Epstein had tried to end his life.
--:-- Anna North: That's correct. So a few weeks ago, jail authorities found Epstein injured in his cell. And it was a little unclear from initial reports whether he had tried to harm himself or maybe someone else had tried to harm him. Whatever the case, the authorities did put him on suicide watch. And so for a time, he was being specifically monitored to make sure he didn't try to harm himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And do we know if he was still on suicide watch this weekend when he took his own life?
--:-- Anna North: He'd actually been taken off suicide watch. This was, of course, a big question that a lot of people had following his death. You know, this is someone who had maybe tried to harm himself. You know, wasn't he on suicide watch? How could this happen? But in fact, a few days prior to his death, he'd been taken off suicide watch. You know, details about this are still kind of coming out, but it appears that he actually had been taken off at the request of his attorneys.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Was there any kind of monitoring going on at the time he did this? Were there cameras? Were there guards coming by? Anything like that?
--:-- Anna North: He was supposed to be monitored. So even though he wasn't formally on suicide watch, jail policies would dictate that for a prisoner who'd been on suicide watch, there were a couple of safeguards that were supposed to be in place. He was supposed to have a cellmate. The theory there is that someone who may have been suicidal should have companionship. And it's also someone who can, frankly, just watch that person. But his cellmate had left the cell at the time of his death, apparently for some kind of appointment. Guards were also supposed to be checking on Epstein, I believe, every half hour. But it appears they hadn't done so in the hours leading up to his death.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Attorney General William Barr appears to be very upset about this. He's saying that we will get to the bottom of what happened and there will be accountability.
--:-- Anna North: That's right. He's also saying that any co-conspirators should not rest easy. The victims deserve justice and they will get it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we know if there's going to be an investigation into how such a high-profile prisoner was left to his own devices?
--:-- Anna North: Oh, yes. There's multiple investigations that are going to happen. The FBI is investigating. The attorney general has called on the Department of Justice to investigate. Several members of Congress have called for a congressional investigation. And it's really like bipartisan calls for this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This happened soon after documents were unsealed on Friday that connected a lot more people to Epstein.
--:-- Anna North: That's right. These documents had been really keenly anticipated for days. Everybody kind of knew that they were about to be released, and they had to do with a defamation case filed in 2015 by a woman named Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and she's claimed that Jeffrey Epstein kept her enslaved as a teenager and sexually abused her along with other girls.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what were the allegations in those documents?
--:-- Anna North: These documents had been really keenly anticipated for days. Everybody kind of knew that they were about to be released, and they had to do with a defamation case filed in 2015 by a woman named Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and she's claimed that Jeffrey Epstein kept her enslaved as a teenager and sexually abused her along with other girls. All you do is obey. That's it. And eventually it led to, well, now we're going to experiment and we're going to try you with another guy and see how you go. So they sent me to an island with a professor and I basically had to do what I did for Jeffrey for him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what was the reaction to these documents?
--:-- Anna North: There was so much anticipation around these documents. People were saying, oh, you know, they're going to implicate President Trump. They're going to implicate Bill Clinton. They're going to implicate every powerful man in the entire country. And they weren't quite as explosive as I think some people had expected. They did include some allegations by the woman in question that she was instructed by Ghislaine Maxwell, who is Epstein's sort of associate, to have sex with former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. There were some allegations in the documents concerning Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. All of these prominent men have denied these allegations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what's the significance of these documents?
--:-- Anna North: It's more deepening the case around Epstein, deepening the case around this woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, and really showing, you know, the level and specificity of allegations that women have brought really against both these people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I guess considering the proximity to when these documents were released, though, it's no surprise that the Internet was teeming with conspiracy theories since the news broke that he was dead.
--:-- Anna North: And then you couple the fact that he had connections to the current president, former President Bill Clinton. Is more information going to come out about exactly how vast Epstein's operation was, what his connections were to these other men, or does his death mean that people will never know?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, his death will complicate matters certainly to some degree. The most basic thing that will happen is obviously he can't stand trial anymore. So some of the women who say that he abused him, they're not going to have the chance to, you know, face him in court and they're not going to see him sentenced.
--:-- Anna North: But that doesn't mean that we can't, as the American public, still find out a lot about what happened, a lot about people who might have been involved other than Epstein and a lot about people who might have looked the other way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a criminal investigation in New York that's still ongoing, even though Epstein's dead.
--:-- Anna North: The U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Jeffrey Berman, put out a statement on Saturday, really letting everyone know that his office is going to keep working on the case. And he said, our investigation of the conduct charged in the indictment, which included a conspiracy count, remains ongoing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what does that conspiracy count imply?
--:-- Anna North: That conspiracy count implies there are other people involved. And so I wouldn't be surprised to see charges and certainly to see ongoing investigation in the coming months.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you spoken to any of Epstein's accusers? Do you know how they feel right now?
--:-- Anna North: So I haven't spoken to his accusers personally, but I actually just this morning spoke with Lisa Bloom, who is an attorney representing two women who say they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein. And I asked her, how are these women feeling right now, now that he's dead? And she said they had two very different reactions. One of them was really angry. She wanted to see Epstein brought to justice and it's not going to happen now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: While some of Jeffrey Epstein's accusers feel like they just lost their shot at justice, his death is unexpectedly shining a light on a totally different issue, the conditions in America's jails.
--:-- Anna North: That's right. That's in a minute on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Before we go, I want to remind you that Magoosh is offering a 15% discount on their test prep materials. If you go to Magoosh.com and enter the promo code today, you'll get 15% off.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, let's talk to Andrew Cohn, senior editor at the Marshall Project and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Andrew, thanks for being here.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How common are suicides in America's jails?
--:-- Andrew Cohn: Suicides in jail are the most common form of death in American jails, believe it or not.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Part of the problem here is that jails and prisons do such a lousy job of reporting the information.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: The latest stats we have is that it is a huge problem, especially in jails, which are, of course, more transitory than prisons. And typically, jails don't have the sort of mental health infrastructures that you really need if you're going to prevent people who may be suicidal from actually acting on their impulses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we have any numbers from any recent year?
--:-- Andrew Cohn: I think the most recent numbers are from 2014, believe it or not.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There have been a number of media reports and academic studies done, but there are people who die basically every day in jails from suicides.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: It's an enormous problem at the state level, too. Alabama recently, in the past year or so, the enormity of the problem with suicides there has come to light only because of a lawsuit that's now in federal court.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The SPLC alleged the Department of Corrections is still not meeting the basic mental health needs of vulnerable prisoners despite a federal court order to take action.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: Just in the past week or so, there are new reports about the extent of the problem in Georgia at the local jail level and at the state level. The Georgia Department of Corrections is investigating an inmate's death at Valdosta State Prison.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is the second inmate death at Valdosta State Prison in the past two months.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: And it obviously, as we saw over the weekend, is a problem as well in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which has a terrible track record of dealing with suicidal prisoners.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you have any numbers from 2014, Andrew?
--:-- Andrew Cohn: The number in jails anyway was somewhere between 350 and 400, which is a lot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why don't we have up-to-date numbers?
--:-- Andrew Cohn: I think it's for the same reason that we don't really have adequate official numbers about police shootings. The incentives are just not there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm sure that every jail official in a local jail knows precisely how many men and women have committed suicide in a particular facility.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: But it's embarrassing information, right? It doesn't make anyone look good. A lot of the reporting of these sorts of events is voluntary. And so you get numbers that are late in coming.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it happening in one place more than another? Like we have this Epstein case where it's happening in the heart of Manhattan.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: It is. It's happening all over the country. I remember the story in Ohio where this really, truly hated serial rapist was basically left to kill himself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For 10 miserable years, they survived three young women summoning every ounce of strength in that house of horrors.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: But Ariel Castro lasted just one month and one day in prison before apparently taking his own life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then they said, oh, geez, we better, this doesn't look good.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: Everyone was, you know, expecting this man to live to be tried. And now he's dead and we're going to basically fudge the records.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A report released today also says two prison guards falsified logs documenting their observation of Castro in the hours before he killed himself.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: The report says video indicates that guards failed to check on Castro at least eight times before he died.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, that's the sort of attitude that should never happen.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: There was a case of a young man named Billy Slagle, I'll never forget, who committed suicide hours before prosecutors in his case found evidence that might have exonerated him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Records on a computerized logbook may have been falsified on August 4th, the night Billy Slagle killed himself on death row in the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: It was almost like a Shakespearean tragedy, where had he held on for a few more days, might have become aware of the good news, essentially, and might have at some point been released from prison.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, yes, it is a nationwide problem. And I'm not sure that there are many jurisdictions that have figured out a way to solve it.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: I think one of the open questions here going forward is whether this death, which really has shocked people into understanding more about how prisons and jails really operate, whether it is enough to jolt Congress into demanding that the Bureau of Prisons does a better job and whether it's enough to jolt local jails into using more of the funding they get to prevent these sorts of things from happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It would seem like an incredible irony if the upshot of Jeffrey Epstein's case and death and life is improving prison conditions across America.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: I agree. And I am not sure it's going to make a difference in the end.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, one of the things that I find fascinating about the reaction to his death is the reaction by the attorney general.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: I was appalled, and indeed the whole department was, and frankly angry, to learn of the MCC's failure to adequately secure this prisoner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If he's paid any attention to congressional testimony over the past decade or to hundreds of news articles about the problem, then he would have known that the Bureau of Prisons has a terrible morale problem.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: It has a terrible problem of understaffing. It has a terrible problem of people swallowed up in overtime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's standing in the way of actually fixing this?
--:-- Andrew Cohn: Well, it seems to me that if there were the political will to ensure the safety of prisoners, whether they're high-profile prisoners like Jeffrey Epstein or prisoners that no one is going to hear about or ever heard of, then you make sure that your jails are fully staffed, that your prisons are fully staffed, that the mental health professionals who are in charge of these prisoners and evaluating their mental health are adequately paid and compensated, that there are enough of them so that when there is a suicide that should not take place, the guards who fail to monitor properly are held accountable.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If those things were to happen, then you wouldn't have the hundreds of inmate suicides that you have in prisons and local jails across the country.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: But it has been that way, even as people have become more familiar with the problem. It seems to me that there just isn't the political will at this point to solve it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Part of that, I think, is Americans are particularly punitive when it comes to inmates.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: Part of it, I think, is an attitude among prison staff and jail staff of animosity towards inmates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And part of it is just the nature of politics and incarceration, which even though it's maybe turning around a little bit in the past couple of years, still is as regressive as it has been for quite some time.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: Do you think there ever will be that political will in America to take better care of its inmates to make sure they serve full terms instead of being murdered or ending their own lives?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: I think one of the open questions here going forward is whether this death, which really has shocked people into understanding more about how prisons and jails really operate, whether it is enough to jolt Congress into demanding that the Bureau of Prisons does a better job and whether it's enough to jolt local jails into using more of the funding they get to prevent these sorts of things from happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It would seem like an incredible irony if the upshot of Jeffrey Epstein's case and death and life is improving prison conditions across America.
--:-- Andrew Cohn: I agree. And I am not sure it's going to make a difference in the end.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.
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