Dyan Neary, Florida Trident

Craig Ridley’s killing was just one of a record 481 deaths in Florida prisons in 2017, marking an upward trend that has now spanned more than two decades. In December 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report showing the number of homicides in state and federal institutions in 2019 was almost quadruple that of 2001, when the bureau began collecting data about mortality in the nation’s prisons. In fact, 2019 saw the highest number of homicides ever recorded by the bureau, and prisoners were nearly three times more likely to die by homicide than other U.S. residents.