Report: Many suicides in federal prisons may have been averted
Dozens of inmates, including disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, have died needlessly in federal prisons as a result of lax supervision, access to contraband and poor monitoring of at-risk inmates, according to a report released Thursday by the Justice Department's watchdog.
The Bureau of Prisons, responsible for about 155,000 inmates, routinely subjects prisoners to conditions that put them at heightened risk of selfharm, drug overdoses, accidents and violence, the department's inspector general found after analyzing 344 deaths from 2013 to 2021 that had not been caused by illnesses.
More than half of those deaths were suicides, and many of them could have been prevented if inmates had received appropriate mental health assessments or had been housed with other prisoners in accordance with departmental guidelines instead of being left alone, like Epstein, the report concluded.
The report “identified several operational and managerial deficiencies” that violated standing bureau policies, said Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, whose investigators previously concluded that Epstein's death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019 was the result of gross negligence and inadequate staffing.
Investigators found “unsafe conditions” in nearly all the deaths they analyzed, Horowitz said. The number of such deaths in the federal system has been rising steadily — to about 50 a year, he added.
Despite the prevalence of conspiracy theories about Epstein's death, the circumstances were strikingly similar to many of the 187 inmates who died by suicide in the period covered by the report. The overwhelming majority were white men who killed themselves by hanging; many were housed alone when they took their lives; and a disproportionate number, 56, were sex offenders — even though a relatively small percentage of federal prisoners are jailed for such crimes.
Investigators cited the overuse of single-inmate cells and restrictive solitary confinement as a significant factor in many suicides. But they said the bureau's failure to flag serious mental health issues — by classifying troubled inmates as low risk — was an equally serious misstep.
Several deaths cited in the report summed up the systemic breakdowns.
Officials at an unnamed federal prison placed an inmate who had recently tried to kill himself alone in a cell, without his personal belongings or follow-up medical care, even though he had been flagged as a suicide risk upon arrival. In another instance, investigators discovered that a psychological assessment of an inmate who had died by suicide had not been updated to reflect a heightened risk of self-harm and instead was cut-and-pasted from a report filed seven years earlier.
A bureau spokesperson did not immediately respond comment.