Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/drug-overdose/)
Almost 22,000 10- through 24-year-olds died of accidental drug overdoses in the United States between 2015 and 2019, according to a new study also finding that males accounted for 71.9% of those deaths and females for 28.1%. Of those 21,689 young people, 3,296 were aged 10 through 19.
Death rates were 5.9 times higher for previously incarcerated 11- to 21-year-olds in Ohio than in that state’s general population of youth enrolled in Medicaid health insurance for low-income people, according to a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Open Network.
In a finding researchers said was especially startling, formerly incarcerated females died at nine times the rate of the general population.
“More than half of all deaths were among youths convicted of crimes against persons,” wrote the researchers, who examined 3,645 formerly incarcerated youth. “More deaths occurred in youths who were incarcerated for the first time and in youths who spent less than or equal to [one] year in custody.”