Jail deaths go way beyond just the dimensions of a cell | Opinion
Valerie Kazarian of South Portland is a retired community planner and business owner. She has experience in a broad range of social services and policy interests.
In his Aug. 12 column, “Confronting the architecture of misery,” Jon Calame, sparked by two recent deaths at the Cumberland County Jail, describes his understanding of problems in today’s jails.
As a one-time resident of the Cumberland County Jail, I bring a different perspective. While I appreciate Calame’s passion and sympathy for inmates in distress, I found his position out of focus and weakly supported. Calame is not necessarily wrong about the statistics, but he is looking in the wrong place for the problem. If we genuinely want to understand why people die in jail, we need to look beyond the cell.
Basically, Calame has the suicide statistics correct. It is true that nationally 44% of local jail suicides occur within the first week of incarceration and 66% occur in the first 30 days. But Calame’s description of “young bodies accumulating in the same jail” is hyperbolic. From November 2024 through September 2025 there were five in-custody jail deaths in Maine — all in different jails. The average age of the inmate was 49. While this is notable, it is hardly “young bodies accumulating in the same jail.”
Calame is also correct that the United States incarcerates a large proportion of its population. But its incarceration rate has declined from its 2009 peak. Maine’s state prison incarceration rate has also declined. This is interesting but it doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why people die in jail.
One claim that Calame makes that isn’t supported by evidence in Cumberland County is that jails are overcrowded. We certainly hear about horrible circumstances in places like Rikers Island, but overcrowding is not an issue here. The Cumberland County Jail is rated to house 570 inmates with an average daily population of 386. The problem is not one of capacity but of staffing.
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Halfway through his column, Calame finally gets down to describing the actual facilities that, he says, are “purposefully miserable.” He begins with the cells. Calame correctly notes that the cells are small — he says 50 square feet. Within that space is everything you need. It’s much like camping out — minimal but functional. But inmates don’t spend all their time in their cells.
Completely missing from Calame’s column is any discussion of the pod, although he provides a picture of it. This is the large social area where much of life outside of the cells happens. Inmates eat, read and recreate, shower and watch TV here. One corrections officer brought daily crossword puzzles and here’s where we watched the events of 9/11. None of this is captured in Calame’s column. And that’s not even the biggest gap.
What Calame misses is that much of what goes on in jail is brought in from outside of its walls. “Approximately 75% of individuals housed in county jails are classified with a substance use disorder, and 60% are classified with a mental health disorder,” according to a report by The Maine Monitor. There is evidence that as the resources of community agencies fall short, jails are left to deal with the behaviors that result.
Substance use disorders, mental health disorders, homelessness, medical issues, relationship issues, unemployment and financial problems don’t stop at the cell door. They enter with the inmate. And sometimes, the crisis ends in death.
There are problems at our county jail, but architecture is not central to them. The parts of the jail that house the inmates are spartan but not inherently bad. What jails cannot control are the problems that individual inmates bring with them. Like the leaves that blow into the kitchen when you walk in from the outside on a windy autumn day, the problems of society blow into the jail every time the door opens.
Preventing deaths in a jail takes more than changing the dimensions of a cell. Whether that death is from suicide, from natural causes, or from some other cause, each case is unique. I look forward to reading Mr. Calame’s next column to see where he will go from here.
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Tagged: columns
