FOI Ref: FOI/2021/3105
You asked
Please supply the number of suicides in prisons and youth offending institutions for the past 5 years broken down by ethnicity and gender.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry regarding suicides in prisons and youth offending institutions.
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 us.
At present ethnicity is not recorded on the death certificate, therefore, unfortunately, we do not hold the requested data.
However, we publish annual statistics for Suicides in England and Wales. Our latest release is based on death registrations between 1981 to 2020. Place of death is recorded as part of the registration process, however we do not always 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.
Special extracts and tabulations of mortality data for England and Wales are available to order (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. We may be able to provide deaths by place of occurrence. All bespoke extracts are subject to legal frameworks, disclosure control, resources, and agreements of costs, where appropriate. 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.