Development and Validation of a National System for Routine Monitoring of Mortality in People Recently Released from Prison.

Using routinely collected unemployment benefits data we detected the majority of deaths in people recently released from prison in Australia. These data may be sufficient for routine monitoring purposes and it may be possible to adopt a similar approach in other countries. Routine surveillance of mortality in ex-prisoners serves to highlight their extreme vulnerability and provides a basis for evaluating policy reforms designed to reduce preventable deaths.