
Inmate
Suicide in Jails essay
The high rate of prison
suicides experienced in recent years could indicate an upward trend or it could merely be an aberration. In this paper I will try to analyze the problem of
suicide in jails and discuss how we can prevent such actions.National studies of prison
suicide rates have been conducted; therefore, this paper is limited to research on individual state prison systems reporting widely disparate finding.
The limited research available on national prison
suicide rates is both somewhat dated and plagued by inconsistent reporting problems. Lester (1982, 1987) cited previous calculations of national prison
suicide rates for two periods: 1978 to 1979 and 1980 to 1983. The rate of
suicide for male inmates was 24.6 and 24.3, respectively, for these two periods. Unfortunately, the above calculations were based on nationally reported Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) data that were underreported. For example, the most recent data available on prison
suicide from the BJS reported a total of 89 Prison
suicides throughout the united States in 1991. This total, however, does not include data from six "nonreporting" jurisdictions, as well as an unknown number of possible
suicides contained within inmate death data listed by BJS as "unspecified causes." excluding nonreporting jurisdictions, the national prison
suicide rate based on BJS data would be 13.9
suicides per 100,000 inmates.