First weeks of freedom deadly for new ex-cons

Newly released inmates were almost 13 times more likely than the general public to die during their first two weeks of freedom, a study in Washington state found.

Drug overdoses were the top killer, with ex-convicts 129 times more likely to die that way within two weeks of their release than the general population. That cause of death was followed by heart disease, homicide and suicide, according to the study, the first major look at the issue.

Over an average of two years, the study found the ex-inmates were 3 1/2 times more likely than other state residents and nearly four times more likely than current inmates to die.

“The differences are more striking for women then they are for men,” said lead researcher Dr. Ingrid Binswanger, a public health researcher and assistant professor at University of Colorado at Denver.

While 87 percent of ex-prisoners in the study were men, the risk of death for the women was 5 1/2 times higher than for other women in the state.

Experts said the rest of the country likely has a similar situation to Washington’s, if not worse, although the specific drugs causing overdoses might vary by region.

Binswanger, who did her research with colleagues while at the University of Washington, noted studies in Europe and Australia found similarly high death rates, particularly right after release from prison.

Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University and a former prison medical director, said that without help, released offenders likely “will reassociate with the group of people they got in trouble with in the first place.”

“We see this every day,” said Allen, whose study in Rhode Island in the 1990s found one in 10 ex-inmates died within seven years, mostly because of substance abuse.

Binswanger’s study was reported in today’s New England Journal of Medicine. It included 26,270 men and 3,967 women released from Washington prisons from mid-1999 through 2003 and used two national databases to track their deaths. It compared them with deaths among other state residents of similar age, race and gender. Over that time, 443 inmates died, 38 in the first two weeks; an average of three deaths occurred among the same number of state residents over two weeks.

The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of Plainsboro, N.J.