In 2024, Sarah Stillman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer for The New Yorker, began looking into a tip she'd received about the starvation-related death of a 65-year-old Arizona woman, Mary Faith Casey. While incarcerated in a county jail for nearly four months and suffering from severe, untreated mental illness, Casey's weight had plummeted from around 145 pounds to 90.
To report the story, Stillman - who founded and directs the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, which supports intensive public-interest journalism and trains young journalists - spent hundreds of hours examining what happened to Casey and others at the Pima County Jail. That investigation led her to uncover a much broader pattern in county jails that appeared to extend nationwide - an alarming number of people were starving to death or dying of dehydration, allegedly due to inadequate mental health care.
