Making prisoner deaths visible: Towards a new epistemological approach

Abstract

In custodial contexts, the duty of states to protect the most fundamental right – to life – is heightened. Nevertheless, prisoner deaths are a universal and frequent concern. The mortality rate among the 11.5 million prisoners globally is up to 50% higher than amongst non-imprisoned persons, forming a human rights and health equity concern. It is therefore peculiar that prisoner deaths have attracted only piecemeal scholarly attention. In this article, we problematize epistemologies of prisoner death, highlighting obfuscations and agglomerations in existing datasets based on poor definitions, reductive statistics and constrained medico-legal categorizations. We provide a springboard towards a new epistemological approach that makes the scale and breadth of prisoner deaths and deceased prisoner characteristics more visible to facilitate prevention. We advance three tenets: count prisoners who die rather than deaths in prison, disaggregate prisoner death data through rights-informed dimensions and adopt explicitly defined, mutually exclusive categorizations.