Who died in Federal Prisons from COVID-19?

As of December 2021, 36,000 inmates from the federal prison system were placed in home confinement because of COVID-19. It would be interesting to get information on the age distribution of those released. The US prison population declined by 157,500 persons during the first 6 months of COVID-19. From March 2020 to February 2021, twenty-four states released a total of 37,700 persons from prison on an expedited basis. In the Federal prison system, only 3% of prisoners are over 65. Since most inmates were under 65 and absence of age-specific data on releases, it is clear that the releases included a broad range of ages. The releases weren’t limited to the United States, with “over a million prisoners have reportedly been released worldwide.”

Since March 2020, the federal Bureau of Prisons has placed more than 36,000 inmates on home confinement, according to the agency’s website. While more than 25,000 have completed their sentences, 7,700 remain on home confinement.

Christina Carrega and Evan Perez, “Thousands of inmates released because of pandemic will be allowed to remain on home confinement, Justice Department says,” CNN, December 21, 2021.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has released data on the number of deaths in each of the 96 federal prisons. It also had data on the number of prisoners, the sex of the prisoners, percent white, percent black, percent Asian, percent Hispanic, the percent over 60 years of age, and the percent inoculated (though many of the deaths presumably occurred before inoculation. Running a regression of the percent death rate on those variables produces consistently statistically significant coefficients, but the only variable that is economically significant is the percent over age 60 — a one percentage point change in the percent over age 60 produces a 23% increase in the average percent who died. All the other variables have a trivial impact — a one percentage point change in any of the other variables produces less than a one percent change in the average percent who died.

Women have a higher rate of deaths than men. The differences between whites, blacks, and Asians are not statistically significant. But whites and blacks had lower death rates than Hispanics.

Here are the simple means and standard deviations for the different variables.