[This article describes deaths by suicide, including reference to a method of suicide.]
Asked if they ever think about suicide, prisoners sitting around a dayroom table at a medium-security facility in Georgia considered the answer fairly self-evident.
“Mostly just when I hear of another one happening.”
“I suppose everyone thinks about it.”
All of us are serving life sentences. Someone joked that personally, their window in which to contemplate suicide had closed, as by now they had “invested decades in outliving the thing.” But the reality is that, as state and federal prison sentences grow longer and longer, suicide becomes a larger presence in our daily lives as time goes on.
The heightened risk of suicide in jails is driven by the fact that detainees are in acute crisis, and that if you happen to be contemplating suicide then jail is an extremely conducive environment in which to do that. Shame, loss, uncertainty and physical isolation often exacerbate the effects of mental illness and/or chaotic substance use.
“[Some] observers assume that, while the risk of suicide looms large in jail among inmates facing the initial stages of confinement, such risk dissipates over time in prison as individuals become more comfortable or tolerant of their predicament and develop coping skills to effectively handle life behind bars,” the National Institute of Corrections wrote in a 1995 report on prison suicide. “This assumption, of course, has not been empirically studied [and] is far too simplistic … the precipitating factors in suicidal behavior among prison inmates are somewhat different and fester over time.”
Thirty years later, the prison suicide remains severely underresearched. Most states provide either incomplete data on prison suicides or no data at all. But we do know that while most jail suicides happen shortly after arrival, and many suicides in prison happen during the first year of someone’s sentence, the majority of prison suicides happen later on.
Suicide risk is higher among people serving long mandatory minimum sentences, and those with life sentences as their maximum. Research has suggested that people serving life sentences have a very high likelihood of multiple suicide attempts.
“It is escape from their personally unendurable environment that allows no recapture, [and the] strongest statement the incarcerated human being could make in protest of their living condition,” Colo*, 14 years into a life sentence, told Filter. “In prison the living condition is the state’s to set. That human beings find it intolerable [to the point of suicide] even once is inexcusable.”
As the years deepen, many prisoners come to view suicide not only as a means of becoming free, but as an act of resistance.
Slavery is not a condition that becomes tolerable with time. Over the three decades and change I’ve spent in Georgia prisons, I’ve seen time and again that as the years of someone’s captivity deepen, they often come to view suicide not only as a means of becoming free, but specifically as an act of resistance against the state by denying further opportunities for indignity and torment.
Researchers have often pointed out that, given that the nature of prison is 24/7 surveillance and zero autonomy, none of us should even be able to die by suicide in the first place. Yet the understaffing crisis means not only that no one is around to provide mental health care, no one’s watching even the suicide observation rooms like they’re supposed to. We issue calls for transparency around deaths-in-custody data, and then we allow prisons to simply continue ignoring them.
Bo*, more than 40 years into a life sentence, noted how prominent a theme suicide is in Russian literature set in Soviet labor camps.
“In the 1950s Gulag, the zek [prisoners] knew they faced years of toil and misery followed by banishment far from home—if they lived,” Bo told Filter. “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago of hearing in the dark the sound of stools falling over as another zek hung himself from the rafters. It is telling that 75 years later the subject of prison suicide is still relevant.”
*Names have been changed
Image via Washington State Department of Corrections