Reducing deaths
A new (17 July 2026) report from Nacro ‘Reducing deaths among prison leavers’ finds than one person dies every day in the year after leaving prison. Someone leaving prison now is more likely to die within three months of release than a person aged under 75 is over the course of an entire year.
The report recommends that more should be done to reduce the risk of people dying after release from prison, estimating that up to one in seven drug-related deaths could be avoided if everyone with a history of opioid dependence received drug substitution therapy on the day they left prison.
The number of deaths after release is significantly higher than before the pandemic. While rates peaked during the Covid-19 period, they have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Compared with people released in 2019/20, someone leaving prison today is 72% more likely to die within two weeks of release and 28% more likely to die within a year.
Drug-related deaths are the largest cause of preventable deaths among prison leavers, accounting for 40% of deaths within the year after release — around three people every week.
Key findings
The report found:
- Between 2019 and March 2025, 2,447 people have died within a year of leaving prison. Of these, 548 people died within a month of their release, and a further 584 died within three months. This means on average more than one person died every day in that period within one year of release.
- Last year one person in 144 people released died within a year– more than three times the rate in 2015. While rates are lower than the spike during the Covid-19 pandemic, they remain significantly higher than at any other point pre-pandemic. Someone released from prison is now more likely to die within three months of release than the average member of the public is in the entire year.
- People are particularly at risk of dying in a drug-related incident immediately post-release, with 40% of deaths in the year post-release being linked to drug consumption. Since 2019, when the current classification system was introduced, the number of identified drug-related deaths in the year post-release has doubled.
- If all people in prison with a history of opioid misuse received substitution therapy on their last day in prison, it could reduce the rate of drug-related deaths immediately post-release by 16%
- Alongside this, increased provision of naloxone to prison leavers with a history of opioid use, and improved support to connect prison leavers to community health services, would help reduce the risk of them dying post-release.
- Homelessness is a major risk factor in post-release deaths, with as many as a third of all deaths in the two weeks post-release being among people who were released into homelessness.
Conclusions & Recommendations
The report identifies the need for better substance misuse treatment on the day of release, improved connections between prison and community services, and robust action to reduce prison leaver homelessness.
It makes four key recommendations:
- Opioid treatment: All people released from prison with an opioid misuse problem should be offered OST on their day of release.
- Naloxone: The Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health and Social Care should set and meet a consistent national standard for the distribution of naloxone on release.
- Access to healthcare: The Department of Health and Social Care should work with the Prisons and Probation Service to ensure that everyone released from prison is registered with a GP and able to access immediate care.
- Prison-leaver homelessness: The Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government should set out a joint plan to meet their target of halving the proportion of people leaving prison homeless.
Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here
