You asked
How many prisoners have committed suicides in the last five years?
Were they victims of hate crime or any violence during their life in prison?
I would be interested too in their genres, nationalities, age, and why they were in prison and if they were convicted.
I am interested too if you have the data on how many prisoners suffered hate crime and the main reasons why this happened.
If there are some updates about how many prisoners had died this year it would be useful, how many died of coronavirus or other circumstances.
We said
Thank you for your request.
Our mortality statistics are based on the information provided at death registration and cover all deaths that occur in England and Wales. Suspected suicides are required to be reported to the local coroner for investigation and all suicides will be certified by a coroner following an inquest. Once the inquest has concluded the death can be registered and will be reported to ONS.
We publish annual statistics for Suicides in England and Wales. Our latest release is based on death registrations between 1981 to 2019. Place of death is recorded as part of the registration process, however we do not aggregate suicide figures down to specific establishment types such as prisons, as such data is likely to be assessed as disclosive. This is in line with our disclosure control policy: Policy on protecting confidentiality in tables of birth and death statistics.
Here is a link to a dataset which may be of interest to you: Drug-related deaths and suicide in prison custody. This analyses the risk of suicide and drug-related deaths among prisoners. This is for death registrations between 2008 to 2016. Here is the corresponding article.
Unfortunately, the circumstances around the death are not supplied on the death certificate. Therefore, we would not know if the suicide was a consequence of hate crime. You may be able to obtain more information around from the home office via: pressoffice@homeoffice.gov.uk.
We also provide weekly death figures by place of death which include COVID-19 statistics, this is available on the 'Covid-19 – Place of occurrence' table. Prisons would fall under the 'Elsewhere' category. As stated previously ONS are unable to aggregate to lower establishments due to the small numbers that may be produced.
Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order. This will be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources and agreements of costs, where appropriate. We can provide the number of suicides per year by key variables such as age, sex and geographical area. Such enquiries should be made to: health.data@ons.gov.uk.
Figures on the prison population are published by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) on their website, so they may have further information that could be of use to you. They can be contacted via email at data.access@justice.gov.uk.