What's behind a surge of deaths at one Ohio jail?

Days after Steven Blackshear was booked into Montgomery county jail in downtown Dayton, Ohio, in January, a nurse found him shaking, in a fetal position and vomiting. He complained of chest and leg pains and was taken for medical testing. Two days later, he was found dead in his cell, covered only in towels.

The 54-year-old is one of seven people to have died in a surge of deaths at the jail since the beginning of this year.

For a facility with a population of slightly more than 600 people, it’s a huge and worrying toll.

It’s more than the number of deaths at jails in the five most-populous counties in Ohio combined, more than Montgomery county’s total for all of 2021 and 2022, and just one fewer than at Rikers Island in New York City – a facility with 10 times the incarcerated population – in the same time period.

A spokesperson for Rob Streck, the Montgomery county sheriff who runs the lockup, said that “ongoing legal considerations” prevented him from speaking to the Guardian about the jail deaths. At a news conference last week, however, Streck said that “this is the most physically ill, mentally ill and addicted population we have ever dealt with”.

At the briefing, Streck refused to take questions related to the deaths at his jail.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/05/ohio-montgomery-county-jail-deaths

When I was a travel nurse in Cincinnati, we routinely got prisoners who were alcoholic or addicted from the city/county jails. Many were placed on Ativan drips, which I never saw done anywhere else, but it worked.