Black men are half as likely to die at any given time if they're in prison than if they aren't, suggests a new study of North Carolina inmates

The black prisoners seemed to be especially protected against alcohol- and drug-related deaths, as well as lethal accidents and certain chronic diseases. But that pattern didn't hold for white men, who on the whole were slightly more likely to die in prison than outside. The new study involved about 100,000 men between age 20 and 79 who were held in North Carolina prisons at some point between 1995 and 2005. Sixty percent of those men were black. Researchers linked prison and state health records to determine which of the inmates died, and of what causes, during their prison stay. Then they compared those figures with expected deaths in men of the same age and race in the general population. Less than 1% of men died during incarceration, and there was no difference between black and white inmates. But outside prison walls, blacks have a higher rate of death at any given age than whites. White prisoners died of cardiovascular diseases as often as expected and died of cancer slightly more often than non-prisoners. Black inmates, by contrast, were between 30% and 40% less likely to die of those causes than those who weren't incarcerated. They were also less likely to die of diabetes, alcohol- and drug-related causes, airway diseases, accidents, suicide and murder than black men not in prison. All told, their risk of death at any age was only half that of men living in the community. For white men, the overall death rate was slightly higher - by about 12% - than in the general population, with some of that attributed to higher rates of death from infection, including HIV and hepatitis.