Deaths in Pennsylvania Prisons

The incarcerated population in Pennsylvania is large, and they face many health challenges. How- ever, health and mortality in correctional facilities have not been well-studied. My research focuses specifically on prisons in Pennsylvania, and conducts a systematic analysis of mortality by manners and causes of death. We find that suicides are slightly elevated in prisons, while natural deaths, accidental deaths, and homicides are slightly reduced in prisons. Among natural deaths, the two leading causes are cancer and hypertensive arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, taking up more than half of all the death cases. In addition, we find that the causes of deaths in the death register data are unstandardized, and some are uninformative or ambiguous, which calls for the need for better quality data on prison mortality.