Many Suicides in Prisons Could Have Been Averted, Justice Dept. Watchdog Says

Dozens of inmates, including the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, have died needlessly in federal prisons as a result of lax supervision, access to contraband and poor monitoring of at-risk inmates, according to a report released on Thursday by the Justice Department’s watchdog.

The Bureau of Prisons, responsible for about 155,000 inmates, routinely subjects prisoners to conditions that put them at heightened risk of self-harm, drug overdoses, accidents and violence, the department’s inspector general found after analyzing 344 deaths from 2013 to 2021 that had not been caused by illnesses.

More than half of those deaths were suicides, and many of them could have been prevented if inmates had received appropriate mental health assessments or been housed with other prisoners in accordance with departmental guidelines instead of being left alone, like Mr. Epstein, the report concluded.

The report “identified several operational and managerial deficiencies” that violated standing bureau policies, said Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general, whose investigators previously concluded that Mr. Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019 was the result of gross negligence and inadequate staffing.

Investigators found “unsafe conditions” in nearly all the deaths they analyzed, Mr. Horowitz said. The number of such deaths in the federal system has been rising steadily — to about 50 a year, he added.

Despite the prevalence of conspiracy theories about Mr. Epstein’s death, the circumstances were strikingly similar to many of the 187 inmates who died by suicide in the period covered by the report. The overwhelming majority were white men who killed themselves by hanging, many were housed alone when they took their lives and a disproportionate number, 56, were sex offenders — even though a relatively small percentage of federal prisoners are jailed for such crimes.