Criminally convicted people are generally not very healthy. Many have smoked, abused drugs and alcohol, and become mentally ill or close to it. So it’s to be expected that some will die in prison. But since prisons are government institutions largely concealed from the public, government should account fully for every death in prison.

Connecticut is doing miserably in this regard.

Katherine Revello of Connecticut Inside Investigator, an undertaking of the Yankee Institute, last week recounted her great difficulty extracting information from the Correction Department and state police about the deaths of three inmates at the prison in Newtown in July last year.

One inmate hanged himself. It took the department three months to answer Revello about the cause of the other two deaths: dru

See Full Page