His wife Rachelle Hebert said she was shocked when she got the call informing her that he was in the hospital and soon after, that he was brain dead. She still questions how the drugs that killed him were able to get into the prison.
Hebert, who was serving a sentence of at least 10 years on arson and other charges, is one of 69 people who died under the Missouri Department of Corrections’ watch through the first half of this year.
The death rate in the state’s prisons increased 34.6% from 2018 to 2022, which saw 135 deaths. This year is surpassing 2022’s rate even as the pandemic has waned and physical mail was stopped last year in a measure aimed at keeping drugs out of the facilities.
In June, prisoners died at a rate of every other day, according to data from the Corrections Department.
“We hear from mothers of people in prison, wives, children,” said Lori Curry, executive director of the nonprofit Missouri Prison Reform. “There are a lot of people in the system with addiction so this is a really scary time to have someone incarcerated.”
She wanted to see more staff searches to prevent contraband from getting into facilities and better health care to prevent medical issues.
“It’s frustrating that deaths are increasing so rapidly,” Curry said.
Karen Pojmann, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections, said the majority of deaths are from natural causes.
“In Missouri, the major causes of death are the same inside and outside prisons: heart disease and cancer,” she said in a statement to The Star.
Problems like addiction — and in particular the opioid epidemic — that affect Missouri communities also impact prisoners. Accidental deaths such as Hebert’s have more than tripled since 2018 when less than 6% of deaths were considered accidental. But that rate skyrocketed in 2021 and 2022 to 20%.
Of the known causes of death from January through June of this year, 72.3% were classified as natural, 19.1% were accidental, 6.3% were a result of executions and 2.1% were suicides. All of the accidental deaths so far this year have been from overdoses, Pojmann said.
The department, Pojmann continued, is committed to keeping dangerous contraband out of prisons, but there are many ways it can get in including through visitors, vendors, attorneys and corrections staff, among other situations.
She added that the department is addressing substance abuse issues by expanding treatment options as well as access to Narcan, which can reverse an opioid overdose.
Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor at Duke University and expert on health in prison systems, said the best way to prevent overdoses is to treat addiction.
“Because drug use is criminalized in this country, you have an over-representation of people with addiction in carceral systems across the country,” she said. “In the same way that people who are addicted to opioids and don’t have access to treatment in the community are at risk for adverse outcomes, I’d say that’s happening inside of America’s prisons and jails and probably at a higher rate.”
Brinkley-Rubinstein added that accidental deaths, including overdoses and injuries, are preventable.
Antwann Johnson, a prisoner at Jefferson City Correctional Center, said even when visitor rooms closed during COVID-19 and physical mail stopped last year — both thought to be ways drugs were smuggled in — overdoses have continued. The 47 year old said prisoners don’t have access to the resources they need when it comes to substance abuse and turn to drugs because they experience a lack of hope.
Robert and Rachelle Hebert met when they were 12. They dated as teenagers in the small town of Cuba, Missouri, where they grew up, but went separate ways, she said, around age 16.
They reconnected when he was in prison in 2015 and married in March 2020. He had three children and three stepchildren, who range in age from 10 to 18.
Rachelle Hebert said he could be a hot head at times, which got him into trouble. But he also tried to help people, especially when it came to health and fitness, topics he was passionate about.
“He is a social butterfly,” she said. “He doesn’t know a stranger at the end of the day.”
She visited him and they would mail a coloring page back and forth, filling it in together.
“It was our little way of having a connection,” she said. “We were making it work.”
Last July, the Missouri Department of Corrections began routing letters to a mail center in Tampa, Florida, where it is scanned and then sent electronically to prisoners.
Brinkley-Rubenstein said that change was not scientific or evidence-based.
“It’s not stopping drugs coming in the building,” she said. “And it’s severing relationships, which has a very negative impact on people’s health.”
Rachelle Hebert said she understood why they took that step, but that it took something special away from prisoners and failed to prevent drugs from getting into prisons.
In January, while at Missouri Eastern Correctional Center, about 35 miles west of St. Louis, Robert Hebert was told his “out date” — Nov. 12, 2024. He and his family were looking forward to his release and hoped to start a new life. He wanted to get a job in the concrete industry and they wanted to save up to buy a house and travel to places they had never been like California and Cancun.
On Feb. 6, he was awaiting a transfer to another facility to undergo drug treatment, a last step in his sentence, when he overdosed.
The next day, Rachelle Hebert got a call informing her that he was in the hospital. When she got there, she was told he was brain dead. He died later that day.
She said the situation has been difficult because it seemed like he had been on the right track and she said she has gotten few answers from the corrections department about the circumstances of his death.
“It’s a lot,” she said. “It’s a roller coaster of emotions.”
©2023 The Kansas City Star. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
