CCC Under Investigation Following Inmate Death

The Caddo Coroner's Office is continuing its investigation into the March 16, 2021 death of a Caddo Correctional Center inmate, 31-year-old Casey Louis Simpson Jr.

Preliminary autopsy results are consistent with natural causes. Autopsy results with toxicology will be available in two to three weeks.

Related to this, Loyola University of New Orleans Law School will release a database of inmate deaths at all Louisiana prisons.

Professor Andrea Armstrong of Loyola, says up until now there hasn’t been a centralized collection of data about when, where, and how state inmates have died. Before receiving grant money to upscale the project Armstrong personally kept data on inmate deaths at Orleans Parish Prison.

Armstrong said 80 percent of US prisons will go a full calendar year without an inmate death. With this database, we can measure how Louisiana prisons stack up to that expectation. “From some of the initial data that we are getting we are seeing that in fact there are plenty of our jails and detention centers that are not following that national pattern,” said Armstrong.

Louisiana is no stranger to heavy incarceration rates being home to 130 jails, prisons, and detention centers and has the highest incarceration rate in the country. The state also does not require its corrections department to keep publicly accessible list of deaths. Using public information requests Armstrong and her law students are compiling a detailed list of inmate deaths going back to 2015.

Armstrong said the database will be a first of its kind in the nation. And she hopes it will be copied all across the country. A website where you can download and search the data is set to be released sometime in spring.