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Every jail has challenges when dealing with people who have serious medical needs.
People who have been arrested can have the same health problems anyone might face. They may have cardiac or respiratory conditions. They may be diabetic. They may be in the throes of an active incident that is material to their legal problems, like drug and alcohol use.
The National Association of Counties reports about 40% of inmates have some kind of medical condition. That figure does not include the 60% with mental health issues and up to 75% with addiction.
Jails, as they take custody of these individuals, assume responsibility for their health and well-being. Meeting that obligation is daunting.
Allegheny County is addressing it with technology.
It began using OverWatch monitoring devices last week.
The county purchased 100 of the wearable devices, which look a lot like a smartwatch and track heart rate, oxygen saturation, sleep, temperature and more. So far, they are being used with 13 people who have serious health concerns. That's less than 1% of the total jail population.
The benefits of the devices are obvious. If someone's heart rate slows or oxygen level drops in the middle of the night, there is time to respond. Without the device, that might be something discovered only when it is too late.
A low heart rate alert just like that happened the very first night the devices were used in Allegheny County Jail.
But that doesn't mean there isn't something else to consider.
While Beryl Lipton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation acknowledges good intentions, she is skittish about collecting and storing data. Tanisha Long of the Abolitionist Law Center is more blunt.
"I'm not a fan of this," she said. "This is another piece of surveillance technology under the guise of safety and wellness."
These are legitimate worries. The devices should be used only when necessary, and the data collected should be focused only on the care of the individuals. Artificial intelligence is used to analyze data and make the program more predictive of dangers.
Does that blur the line on whether inmates become test subjects? Their information, even if anonymized, could be used far longer than their stays in the jail.
The inmates in question have agreed to participation, and the data is supposed to be protected in accordance with federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements.
"We don't always have a good imagination for how people will use the data collected against us," Lipton said.
Recent revelations about unexpected AI behavior make that warning even more poignant.
The questions make it incumbent on jails to anticipate risks and build safeguards. When acting to protect people from one threat, you can't leave them open to others.
The jail is committed to a two-year use of the OverWatch program. That means it has that long to show not just that the benefits outweigh the concerns, but that the concerns can be mitigated.