The Limitations Of Male Prison Suicide

In American jails there is a frightening amount of inmate suicides that occur, and seem to stay under the radar and unspoken about. There are many different contributing factors that can lead to an inmate ultimately choosing to take his or her own life. Being sentenced to jail can be difficult for various inmates to handle and one can have a risk of developing a mental illness if he or she has not already been diagnosed as mentally ill. A mental illness can become a battle with one’s self that some cannot win, and only see darkness ahead. Inmates being confined in jail can lead to a breaking point, which is suicide. Other factors include inmates being stressed out and fearing imprisonment. Jails across the United States have to take initiative regarding inmate suicides or else the suicide rates could increase. Without treatment, awareness, and prevention there will be no improvement in decreasing the amount of inmate suicides. The conversation of inmate suicide has to be had between jail officials, inmates, and society because there is help out there and everyone must know that it is not cowardly to ask for help.

This paper explores the topic of mental health within prisons and how it affects the inmates. The report of my findings were through research of twelve articles, two credible website sources, and a published textbook.

“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” - Phil Donahue. As a complex, tragic public health issue, suicide occurs in men significantly more often than in women. Suicide is simply defined as the act of intentionally ending one’s own life, however, the factors that play into a person making that decision are anything but simple. The most evident and severe effect of suicide is the loss of a valuable, meaningful human life. According to Harvard School of Public Health (n.d.), suicide affects parents, children, siblings, friends, lovers, and spouses; the loss to society is psychological, spiritual, and financial. People who lose a loved one to suicide often experience devastating effects and deal with a complex grief. These

The incarcerated population are typically of low socioeconomic and low education levels. (4) Interestingly, low socioeconomic status and education levels on their own are directly linked with poor health. (5) When these social determinants of health are combined with prisonisation; the adaptation process in which incarcerated individuals adjust themselves to behavioural standards within the institutions which are not comparable with those of life outside prison.(6) This confines the already vulnerable to an environment of violence and drug use, which leads to further decline in health status while serving sentences. (1) In addition to the low socioeconomic status and education level of prison inmates, we can also establish that inmates are predominately male when compared to the

(Winkler 1992). The acts take place at these specific times and days due to the

"What is eliminated in prison is choice. What is encouraged is obedience. Bruno Bettelheim illustrated the result when he stated 'a prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo....Can one imagine a greater triumph for any system than this adoption of its values and behaviour by its powerless victims?' Until choice can be freely exercised and caring behaviour encouraged, there can be no meaningful change and the 'rehabilitation' of 'criminals' will only be a system's triumph over the values and behaviour of the powerless in our society." (Knopp, Boward, Morris, Schnapper, 1976 p9)

Confined prisoners, many of whom are later released at the end of the sentence, are excruciated with a new behavioral deficiency as a result of their time in solitary confinement. This can dangerously affect social orders/groups and it can prompt higher rates of recidivism among these prisoners. As for a psychological aspect, any human contact is critical capacity for keeping the faculties in place and when that human contact is banned or denied, inmates can lose their capacity to work appropriately. Now and again prompt themselves to inflict self-harm as well as harm others in the population. Only one could imagine what this isolation could do to a

In 2014, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death overall in the United States. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, 2015), there were twice as many suicides than there were homicides. Suicidal ideation (SI), defined as an individual thinking about, considering, or planning their suicide, is established before the act of committing suicide. Research suggests that adverse childhood experiences (CDC, 2015) will put an individual at risk for developing a mental illness that could result in SI and suicide attempt (SA). It is important for the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner (PMHNP) to recognize the signs of SI and SA while assessing their client.

Huey, M. & Mcnulty, T. (2005). Institutional Conditions and Prison Suicide: Conditional Effects of Deprivation and Overcrowding. The Prison Journal, 85(4), 490-515.doi:10.1177/0032885505282258. Sage Publications.

Mental illness affects roughly 56 percent of state prison inmates and 64 percent of jail inmates. It is a disorder that interferes with mental cognition involving changed thinking, emotion, behavior, or a combination of both. Several things are thought to be correlated with mental illness among the incarcerated. Some examples include prior life stressors, gender differences, prison life environment, etc (Drapalski et al., 2009; Gosein, Stiffler, Frascoia, & Ford, 2015). In the present paper, the role mental illness plays in the life of incarcerated inmates is investigated. It is hypothesized that individuals diagnosed with a mental illness are more likely to be incarcerated than inmates without a mental

correctional officers in the jails need to be reprimanded for when they show unnecessary violence and force to an inmate who did not do anything. The tertiary prevention plan that needs to be maintained is providing the correct mental health attention to inmates that need it. The suicide rates in jail need to be cut down because it is becoming ridiculous.

Researchers conduct hypotheses that suicide could be contagious. Researchers had a total of 22,064 individuals ages 12 to 17. When conducting the study they met on cycles to monitor the exposure to suicide. All groups which were separated into age had an outcome of 95% of exposure to suicide. Researchers also questioned how often certain groups were or had feelings of depression or suicidal thoughts from stressful events during the cycles. In further research, 24.1% from the ages 16 and 17 responded that someone from school has committed suicide and which 20.1%

“Although there is limited research on the effects of isolation on incarcerated youth, the existing studies have found that it is correlated with high rates of suicide as well as with post-traumatic stress disorder ("PTSD"), depression, and future criminal activity” (Birckhead, 2015, pg.10). In support Hayes (2009) review of suicide deaths in confinement, almost 70% of youths died by suicide in the juvenile justice system had a history of suicidal behavior, with 45.5% having made a prior suicide attempt. Interviews with many juveniles put in solitary confinement say you can lose your mind and harming themselves or attempt suicide. A juvenile states "It's an awful thing, solitary. . . . It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment" ( Simkins, Beyer, Geis, 2012, pg.250). This quote of a juvenile in confinement shows solitary confinement can literally take away your life and cause

Incapacitation is defined as “the use of imprisonment or other means to reduce the likelihood that an offender will be capable of committing future offences” (Schmalleger, 2014). Incapacitation in itself is stressful, not to mention all the stressors that are secondary to being locked up. Coping with stress is a major part of life, both in prison and in the real world. How one decides to cope depends largely on personality, previous learnings and experience. One study evaluated the different in coping between prisoner’s who self-harmed and those who did not. Data from this study, suggest that prisoners who had recently self-harmed employed coping strategies that were of lower quality than those employed by prisoners who have never self-harmed in

The extent of punishment enforced by officers in each prison is not reflected in reviews and is not easy to conceptualise and measure. Survivability in a prison relates to a prisoner’s ability to be treated fairly and to feel as a human being whilst in the prison. It enables the prisoner to have the opportunity to change their lives and learn from their offending behaviour without extra psychological pain. The levels of distress are shown to be highly correlated with institutional suicide rates and can be explained by significant difficulties in the levels of respect, fairness and humanity shown to the prisoners (Liebling, 2011a). There are also factors like varying administrative ‘styles’, distinct histories and ideologies, or even the age, geographical location, and architecture of the establishment, which can affect how survivable a prison of the same security category is (Adler and Longhurst, 1994).