RETRACTION: 11 people have died at a South King County jail in the last two years - why?

Clarification: On March 10, 2025, Soundside aired a segment about a high number of deaths among people detained at the South Correctional Entity, commonly known as SCORE. After it aired, our staff was contacted by a SCORE official, who objected to two claims made in our broadcast. 

One, was an assertion that reports regarding unexpected fatalities that occurred at the facility were not posted within the required timeframe and that some reports remained outstanding. After looking into the Washington State Department of Health website, including searches on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it appeared that at least some, if not all, of the required reports had been posted in the weeks before our segment aired. The improper labeling of these reports by date of death instead of publication date on DOH’s website may have contributed to the oversight. Members of our team, including the show’s editor, had background discussions with the reporter we interviewed and the SCORE official who raised the issue, and were satisfied that our segment contained errors. 

The second assertion was that the mortality rate quoted in the segment for detainees at SCORE was inaccurate, because while 11 deaths in a two year period is arguably high, according to the Department of Justice, it is not enough of a basis to extrapolate a statistically clear comparison with other rates. While the original reporting pointed out this caveat, our broadcast did not. 

Because the central framing of our segment was that SCORE “has had over three times the average in-custody death for Washington jails,” we felt it was not possible to correct the errors and decided instead to remove the segment audio from our podcast feed and issue a clarification on the show’s site.

We did not find reason to question the bulk of the reporting that originally aired on SCORE’s recent record of deaths in custody, concerns from family members of those who died, and the troubling reports of conditions at the jail from people who were held there and a former employee of WellPath.  

We plan to address this on-air in an episode of Soundside in the near future.