Prison deaths report details major missteps

WASHINGTON — The kind of systemic failures that enabled the high-profile prison deaths of notorious gangster Whitey Bulger and financier Jeffrey Epstein also contributed to the deaths of hundreds of other federal prisoners in recent years, a watchdog report released Thursday found.

Mental health care, emergency responses and the detection of contraband drugs and weapons all are lacking, according to the latest scathing report to raise alarms about the chronically understaffed, crisis-plagued federal Bureau of Prisons.

The agency said it’s already taken “substantial steps” toward reducing preventable deaths, though it acknowledged there’s a need for improvements, including in mental heath care assessments.

More than half of the 344 deaths over the course of eight years were suicides, and Justice Department watchdog investigators found policy violations and operational failures in many of those cases. That included inmates who were given potentially inappropriate mental health assignments and those who were housed in a single cell, which increases the risk of suicide.

In one-third of suicide cases, the report found staff did not do sufficient checks of prisoners, an issue that has also been identified in Epstein’s 2019 suicide as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. In that case, guards were sleeping and shopping online instead of checking on him every 30 minutes as required, authorities have said. The prison also never carried out a recommendation to assign him a cellmate and failed to search his cell.

The report examined deaths from 2014 through 2021 and found the numbers increasing over the last few years even as the inmate population dropped. In many cases, prison officials could not produce documents required by their own policies, the report states.