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Naturalizing unnatural death in Los Angeles County jails
Open accessAbstract
In this paper we use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how death investigations in Los Angeles County jails disproportionately naturalize death among Black and Latino incarcerated people. Our study is based on an assessment of 58 autopsies, coroner investigator narratives, and toxicology reports produced between 2009 and 2018. We found that the Medical Examiner frequently arrived at natural or undetermined death determinations that minimized the culpability of carceral staff for loss of life that occurred within county jail. In our dataset, Black people were disproportionately classified as natural. Undetermined deaths were almost exclusively Latino. More than 75% of the cases in our study were deaths that occurred before standing trial. Our findings reveal how biomedical knowledge about incarcerated Black and Latino people is used to erase the life‐diminishing effects of punishment, neglect, and maltreatment that are central to the project of mass incarceration.
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“for example, forensic pathologists may be biased to avoid rendering a homicide manner of death when a person dies while in police custody; concluding the death as ‘natural’ or ‘undetermined’ often avoids a full investigation of the circumstances (and perhaps responsibility and accountability) for their death (Shapiro & Keel, 2023).”
From Biased and biasing: the hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects (2025) · cites this paper as Shapiro & Keel, 2023
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Biased and biasing: the hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects
Dror, I. E. (2025) · Behavioral Sciences · doi:10.3390/bs15040490 · Cited by 29
Metadata
- Authors
- Shapiro, N., & Keel, T.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- Corresponding author
- Shapiro, Nicholas
- Keel, Terence
- Venue
- Medical Anthropology Quarterly
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2023-10-18
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 6-23
- ISSN
- 0745-5194 (ISSN-L)
- 1548-1387
- PMC
- PMC10922010
- OpenAlex
- W4387765552
- Cited by
- 14
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1
- FWCI
- 6.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Medical Anthropology Quarterly (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (108655, 79694)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Torture, Ethics, and Law
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Emergency Medicine › Restraint-Related Deaths
- Keywords
- natural death, death investigation, racial disparities, mass incarceration, toxicology reports, biomedical knowledge, Los Angeles County jail
- MeSH terms
- Jails, Incarceration, Black or African American, Death, Hispanic or Latino, Humans, Los Angeles, Anthropology, Medical
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