Inmates from Washington state prisons in the US are 13 times more likely to die within the first two weeks of their release than other people of similar age, sex and race. The most likely cause of death at this vulnerable period of a former inmate’s life is drug overdose, followed by suicide, heart disease, and homicide. This research is published in the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The study was led by Dr. Ingrid Binswanger of the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, University of Colorado at Denver, and the team included Dr. Marc Stern of the Washington State Department of Corrections, and other scientists from Seattle. The scientists conducted a retrospective cohort study on 30,237 former inmates who left prison in the period July 1999 to December 2003. They used data from prison records and linked it to the National Death Index. They compared the figures with those on Washington State residents, using data from the large epidemiological databases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The results showed that 443 of the former inmates had died during a mean follow-up period of 1.9 years after release, […]