Prison advocates are calling attention to a scathing report from the Justice Department that details how mismanagement at federal prisons contributed to deaths of hundreds of inmates within the past decade.
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report on the Federal Bureau of Prisons released earlier this month found that 344 inmates died, the majority due to suicide or homicide, in federal institutions between 2014 and 2021. Other deaths were categorized as accidental or unknown, many of which involved drug overdoses, according to the report.
“We have to do better with recognizing the challenges associated with death in custody,” Dr. Cynthia Swann, a member of the American Bar Association’s Civil Rights & Social Justice Leadership Council, said of the report.
Suicides accounted for more than half of the inmate deaths due to managerial and procedural inadequacies. High-profile deaths in federal prisons including Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 prompted the review, which identified “serious BOP job performance and management failures,” the report said.
The OIG cited “policy violations and operational failures,” including a lack of completed suicide risk assessments of inmates, as having contributed to the number of deaths. It also noted staff potentially provided “inappropriate Mental Health Care Level assignments for some inmates who later died by suicide.”
Details of the report came at no surprise to Dr. Roger Mitchell, Jr., director of the Centers of Excellence for Trauma and Violence Prevention at Howard University.
“I think there’s an opportunity to not just look at the injury deaths that are occurring in the federal prisons, but also to look at the natural deaths that are occurring,” he said, “so that we can get an understanding of how individuals are dying from disease in custody from the legal system.”
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