In the report – How recording inequalities can reduce prisoner deaths – a team of experts from the University of Nottingham highlight that equality data, including characteristics of prisoners such as disability and indicators of socioeconomic deprivation, was an essential foundation for evidence-based action to prevent deaths in custody.

The study, which is part of the European Research Council funded RECEDE project, was led by Philippa Tomczak, professor of criminology and criminal justice and Dr Laura Haas, research fellow, in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.

Since 2012, the number of prisoner deaths in England and Wales has risen significantly. Many of these deaths are preventable but remain largely invisible to the public.

Professor Tomczak said: “Our report highlights that enhanced data is an essential foundation for evidence-based action to prevent prisoner deaths. Yet, information on key prisoner characteristics such as ethnicity, disability and socioeconomic deprivation is not routinely recorded or published as part of prisoner death investigations.

“This means that prisoner death investigations are not compliant with the Public Sector Equality Duty and do not align with domestic abuse related death investigations, child death investigations or maternal mortality data.”

In their report, the team found that enhancing death data would help save lives, improve services and:

• Inform service provision to address unequally distributed risks of death;
• Improve consistency across different types of death data and investigations;
• Enhance compliance with the Equality Act 2010 and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities;
• Build on initiatives including the Data First programme and the Better Outcomes through Linked Data (BOLD) partnership.

The team recommends that the Ministry of Justice and Prisons and Probation Ombudsman strengthen prisoner data by:

• Including prisoner characteristics in Prisons and Probation Ombudsman death investigation reports and bringing individual reports together into a single dataset;
• Increasing recognition of disabilities in death datasets;
• Publishing ethnicity data at more detailed levels of disaggregation;
• Including socioeconomic deprivation in prisoner death data;
• Publishing an intersectional breakdown of equality data.

Dr Haas said: “Implementing our recommendations would enable an analysis of patterns of inequality and unmet needs in prisoner deaths that are currently obscured, and support evidence-based prevention of deaths and service development. In our report, we provide examples of good practice from other death datasets to illustrate how to align recording practices and facilitate implementation of our recommendations.”