28 people in two years doesn't really sound like a lot. Is that higher per capita than the regular population?
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Depends on how and what they die from. It's a controlled environment with (what should be) heavily monitoring by personnel (that's what they're paid to do).
Problem is, jail / prison guards don't give a shit about inmates. Even if you're in pre-trial jail (a massive overpopulation), they'll barely give you the fucking time. And asking for necessities is a chore itself.
So if they actually gave a shit, few to no inmates would ever die in holding.
That's a pretty good question.
On this page, the city says it held 6,138 inmates on 9/1/2023, and as of August the average stay was 92 days. Wikipedia says the city's estimated population was 8,467,513, as of July 2021.
Someone's gotta be smart enough to calculate an approximate answer from those numbers, but I slept through the kind of math it would take. Anyone?
Uhhh, I'll try. This site lists the New York death rate at 0.0060 (0.6%)
28/6138 = 0.0046 (0.46%) So it's about the same? Not sure how to include the average length of stay in the calculation.
It's math, so I'm out of the running. I think we need to factor in length of stay, but might be wrong. I suppose the average inmate is younger than the average New Yorker, too.
Does Lemmy have an ask-a-mathematician subLemmy?
You do not need to include the length of stay. You will need to divide the interval (22 months/1 year)... 0.46%/(22/12)=0.25% per year.
From there, it would make sense to control for age. To do that, youd want to integrate an actuarial table based on age demographics for both populations. It would also make sense to control (if data is available) death rates mortality rates for a similar at-risk population... you could go on and on.
Ultimately, statistics can be tortured into telling you whatever you want to hear.