America
Suicide leading cause of death in US jails: Report
Washington, Aug 5
The number of inmates who
died in US state prisons and local jails continued to increase in 2013
and peaked at 4,446 since 2007, a federal report said on Tuesday.
According
to the report by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), both local
jails and state prisons witnessed an increase in inmate deaths from 2012
to 2013, with the number of death increasing from 958 to 967 in local
jails and 3,479 to 3,357 in state prisons.
The report found that
while the number of illness-related deaths in local jails declined, the
decrease was offset by a noticeable increase in unnatural causes of
death, such as suicide, drug or alcohol intoxication, accident and
homicide, according to Xinhua news agency.
As in every year since
2000, the report said suicide was the leading cause of death in local
jails, accounting for more than a third of all jail deaths in 2013. The
report found that a total of 327 jail inmates committed suicide in 2013,
an increase of 12 percent compared to 2009 level.
The number of
drug or alcohol intoxication deaths in local jails increased from 57 in
2012 to 70 deaths in 2013, and the number of death deriving from
accidents increased from 18 to 31. Homicides caused 28 deaths, said the
report, making it one of the least common causes for death in jails.
Meanwhile,
the report found that in 2013, about 90 percent of deaths in state
prisons were related to an illness, six percent were suicides and three
percent were homicides.
Calculated together, cancer (31 percent)
and heart disease (26 percent) accounted for about half of all
illness-related deaths in prisons, said the report.
Every state
department of corrections reported at least one prisoner death in 2013.
Nearly a quarter of those prisoner deaths occurred in Texas and
California. White inmates accounted for more than half of the deaths,
and nearly all were male.