A study that looked at fatal overdoses involving released inmates from all Ontario prisons between 2015 and 2020 suggests their risk of death increased by up to 50 per cent with the start of the pandemic.
Researchers looked at data for nearly 130,000 people and found that just over 22-hundred of them died of a opioid-drug overdose.
Lead author Amanda Butler, assistant professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, says those deaths amount to one quarter of the overdose fatalities in Ontario during the six-year period.
She says former inmates were most vulnerable in the first two weeks after being released, often as they struggled to connect with services that were reduced or unavailable, especially between April and December 2020 due to pandemic restrictions.
Butler says the risk of death from an overdose is still substantially high one year after someone reintegrates into a community, and it's 25 times higher for men and 67 times higher for women compared to those who didn't go to prison.
The study was published Oct. 24 in the medical journal PLOS One.