Bucks County has confirmed another death at its county jail occurred last year, but has refused to release additional details or say why it was not publicly reported at the time.
This news organization learned about the July 8 death last month after requesting information from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections about deaths at the county jail last year. The state agency listed the death as a suicide in the county’s monthly extraordinary occurrences report in August, according to DOC spokeswoman Susan McNaughton.
Bucks County spokesman Larry King confirmed only the date of death and that the inmate was a 72-year-old man. The county is not releasing any other information surrounding the death “for legal reasons,” King said, but he did not elaborate when asked in an email.
Bucks County Coroner Dr. Joseph Campbell identified the inmate as Semion Parkansky, of Feasterville; his cause of death was determined to be asphyxia.
According to Campbell, a corrections officer reported he found Parkansky dead in his cell at 4:15 a.m. It is unknown if Parkansky was on suicide watch at the time of his death, a red-flag status that triggers additional safety measures such as frequent monitoring.
Parkansky had been incarcerated for 14 months at the time of his death. He was arrested in May 2017 for sexual offenses involving a child that occurred in a decade earlier, court records show. He was sentenced in January 2018 to 11 to 23 months in Bucks County jail after pleading guilty to indecent assault on a person less than 13 years old and endangering the welfare of children.
Four Bucks County inmates died last year, but the county did not release information about those deaths until media members made inquiries. In one case, Brittany Ann Harbaugh, 28, of Philadelphia, died of complications from opiate withdrawal on Oct. 1, but the county did not confirm her death until two months after this news organization, acting on a tip, first asked if the death occurred. The coroner’s office released the cause of death.
One month after Parkansky took his own life, another Bucks County inmate, Charles Freitag, 57, of Bensalem also died by suicide.
Pennsylvania has no regulations for public notification of deaths in correctional institutes. Neither Bucks nor Montgomery County have a written policy for releasing information about inmate deaths, though they have protocols for informing other officials including the district attorney’s office, county commissioners, prison oversight board members and county spokespeople.
Bucks County Commissioner Diane Marseglia said such a policy should be put in place, though she doesn’t support releasing inmate names.
“I honestly assumed this was public information unless there was a known lawsuit, and wonder if there is no (county) policy because no one asked,” she said.
Commissioner Chairman Robert Loughery added that it has not been the county’s practice to publicize prison deaths, but he agreed that the public has a right to know when a death occurs at the jail “provided we are following the state-mandated reporting requirements and sensitive to whatever circumstances legal or otherwise.”
The Bucks County inmate deaths would have been reported sooner if they were serving state prison time. Under DOC policy press releases are issued for all unnatural deaths.
State regulations only require county jails have written policies for the prompt notification of an inmate’s listed emergency contact in the event of death, serious illness or accident. The regulations also require jails report all in-custody deaths by the 30th day of the month following the death to the state corrections department.
But the state agency collects only “numerical figures for statistical and trending purposes,” McNaughton said. Counties are not required to submit information about the circumstances surrounding the death or identify the inmate.
The lack of public notification policies for in-custody deaths among county jails and detention centers is not unusual, according to Martin Horn, secretary of corrections under former Gov. Tom Ridge. There are no national standards or rules for such notification, but there are best practices, said Martin, who now lectures on corrections systems at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
The public reporting of inmate deaths promotes trust and accountability in the community, Martin said. He noted the New York Commission on Corrections has statutory authority to investigate all in-custody deaths in the state and it releases reports on those investigation findings to the public, he added.
“We operate these jails on behalf of the public and the public has a right to know,” Horn said. “The people who are in jail are accused — not convicted — and they are the children of our community. A jail that is properly run has nothing to fear from transparency.”
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