Four in ten prisoners who took their own lives in custody were denied adequate healthcare before their deaths, according to damning new figures exposing the scale of neglect inside Britain’s overcrowded prisons.
Inmates are legally entitled to receive the same standard of healthcare as someone living in the community. However, official findings uncovered by The Independent show in 101 out of 233 self-inflicted deaths investigated by the prisons watchdog between 2020 and 2023, the mental or physical healthcare did not meet this requirement.
