The first week after prison is the deadliest for ex-inmates

A paper in the Lancet on April 10th by an international research consortium led by Rohan Borschmann from the University of Melbourne and Stuart Kinner from Curtin University, in Perth, sums up an analysis of the records of nearly 1.5m prisoners released between 1980 and 2018 in America, Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland and Sweden. These ex-prisoners were followed up by consortium members for an average of seven years. The researchers found that mortality was highest in the first week following release and fell dramatically after that (see chart). In the first week it was more than twice as high as it was a month later. (The researchers excluded the spike in deaths on day one, which they discovered was partly due to recording errors for inmates who had died in custody.)