Portugal: Prison death statistics for 2005
01 March 2006
In response to a parliamentary question asked by Partido Ecologista dos Verdes (Green party) MP Francisco Madeira Lopes concerning the death in mid-December 2005 of three prisoners undergoing drug rehabilitation treatment using methadone in Porto's Custóias prison, and prison deaths in general, on 11 April 2006 the ministry of justice supplied parliament with official prison death figures for 2005, including a breakdown of the circumstances and places in which these occurred.
There was a total of 93 deaths in Portuguese prison establishments in 2005, of which nine were suicides, all by hanging. Information was not supplied about a large number of cases for which the cause of death was yet to be ascertained (35), although a large proportion of the deaths were caused by AIDS (25) and other health problems (18). In two cases, an inmate was killed by fellow detainees. The prisons in which the largest number of deaths (4) took place were Sintra and Porto. The overall figure is higher, by ten, than the one for 2004, resulting in the rate of deaths per 10,000 inmates rising to 72, one of the highest in Council of Europe member countries notes the Associação Contra a Exclusão e para o Desenvolvimento (ACED). ACED, which runs an observatory on prisons and has posted the ministerial written answer on its website, criticises the state’s persistent failure to react to this situation, or to make the high rate of deaths in prison a key issue in its prison reform policy. Madeira Lopes followed up his question with another, on 3 June 2006, in which he notes that in spite of Portugal's pioneering role in the abolition of the death sentence, sentences depriving people of their liberty, in effect, often "become...death sentences".
Associação Contra a Exclusão e para o Desenvolvimento
http://www.sociofonia.net/aced/
Deaths in custody
http://iscte.pt/~apad/ACED/ficheiros/obituario.html
Observatory on prisons
http://iscte.pt/~apad/ACED/ficheiros/observatorio.html
Madeira Lopes follow-up question, 2.6.2006;
Written answer detailing deaths in custody in 2005, http://iscte.pt/~apad/ACED/textos/obitos%202005.pdf
Statewatch, vol.15 no1.