Hamilton County Jail has had an inmate death rate 2.2 times higher than the U.S. local jail average since the sheriff’s office took over operations from a private contractor, according to data obtained by the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
To allow comparisons across agencies, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics calculates mortality rates by comparing deaths to the average daily population of the jail, expressed as a rate per 100,000 inmates, even for jails that have far fewer deaths or inmates than the rate suggests.
Using that rate, Hamilton County Jail inmate mortality amounts to 372 deaths for every 100,000 inmates from 2021 to June 2024, and over a third of those deaths were from drug overdose or suicide, the sheriff’s office data shows.
In comparison, the 2019 local jail death rate in the United States, which was the most recent year jail mortality data was made available, was 167 deaths per 100,000 inmates, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.