The recent prison strikes have made prescient certain aspects of the U.S. prison system that need changing but there is an important, often ignored, issue in the U.S. prisons that also needs to be addressed: the prison suicide rate.
After years of gradual decline, the U.S. prison suicide rate began to rise again for the first time in a number of years and, since 2013, has been rising steadily. And while prison is not supposed to be an enjoyable experience, certainly, even if you believe prisoners should be punished rather than rehabilitated, we can agree that the conditions of prison should not be so bad that anyone is more inclined to kill themselves.
I think it will help if we first delve into some facts about the U.S. prison suicide rate.
State prison suicide rates are much worse than federal prisons (though federal prison suicide rates are still nothing to boast about) and some are as high as 45 per 100,000 inmates. Compared to the general population rate of 13 per 100,000, it is a more than significant difference. Suicide in prison is the third leading cause of death while in the general population it is the tenth — even less common than deaths from archaic bogeyman’s like pneumonia and influenza. And in 2014, of the 3,927 deaths in all U.S. prisons, 274 were from suicide. That’s a death-by-suicide rate of 7 percent. If the general population of the U.S. had a death-by-suicide rate of 7 percent, almost 190,000 people would be killing themselves each year — 5.3 percent higher than the current rate.
A skeptic at this point would say that the statistics are skewed, that maybe prisoners are already pre-disposed to commit suicide at a higher rate than the average person, but Occam’s Razor would say that the simplest answer to determining the cause of the disparity between prison suicide rates and general population suicide rates is that prison — put bluntly — sucks.
The daily challenges of a prisoner are Sisyphean in nature. The pernicious aspect of prison that might as well be pushing a boulder up a hill endlessly. But I would argue that for prisoners, it’s almost as if the boulder gets heavier each day. As physical stress aggregates and wears down the body, as they become inured to anxiety and as lack of meaning begins to layer upon itself day-after-day like sediment, the boulder becomes slightly bigger.
Eventually, the day comes when the prisoner tries to push the boulder, but can only hold it in place, forcing them to either accept the position they find themselves in and, if they can, hold the boulder or admit to themselves that they are never going to receive the help they need to continue living and let go, letting it roll over them, ending both their life and their situation.
What makes the prison suicide rate so alarming is that most prisoners have committed entirely non-violent crimes and in no sense of the word ‘justice’ deserve to carry out their sentence in a setting that might cause them to become suicidal.
But unfortunately for non-violent or petty offenders, the degree of one’s crime does not make one exempt from the realities of U.S. prison-life. Not the stultifying structure — the cruel fact that your desires do not matter and that you will do what you are told, when you are told. Not from hearing cries of fulmination in the night. Not from long hours of boredom, isolation and regret-laden contemplation. Not from post-release societal malaise when (if) you get out. And of course, no one is exempt from all the other daily experiences of prison that overtime, can compress one’s will to live like a car compactor, until the person that was first sentenced, like the car itself, is no longer recognizable.
There is an analogy made by David Foster Wallace in his book "Infinite Jest" that illustrates both his own perspicacity of this issue and the point I’m trying to make. Wallace equates the experience of the suicidal person, or the “so called ‘psychotically depressed’ person”, to someone trapped in a burning high-rise. And I quote: “Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling ... is still just as great as it would be for you or me [but] ... The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames … It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.”
It is the quotidian experience of prison that acts as the flames because deciding to commit suicide is not a spurious inclination but rather an amalgamation, an accumulative despair stemming from how they are treated, and then an ensuing acceptance that they can no longer justify not killing themselves. It is the very conditions of prison that cause people to be 5.3% more likely to kill themselves and it is our unwillingness to change these conditions that perpetuate it.
When I think of the problem of prison suicide, it seems more akin to something like global warming than other social welfare issues because in both cases, we recognize the problem, we verifiably know that something needs to be done, we know exactly what must be done to fix the problem, and yet we either start too late, do too little, or sit in never-ending games of legislative thumb war.
It is issues like these, the ones that come about, or are at least preserved, by lack of action, that make me think of a line from Richard Linklater’s 2001 prodigious film, "Waking Life". In the scene I’m speaking of, the protagonist and an older gentleman discuss why history is not a story of progress “but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes”. The older man goes on to say that this raises the real question of why we never advance, of why we have not reached a utopia yet, ultimately asking the protagonist whether he thinks this inability to progress comes from one of two fundamental human attributes: fear or laziness.
Is it fear of upsetting the status quo – of changing the way things have been done in favor of an untested method – that perpetuates problems such as the prison suicide rate, or is it the desire for complacent comfortableness rather than the hard, but overall beneficial, work of improving society that keeps these problems from being resolved?
So, I will end by asking you, should we keep pretending that we are giving people justice when we are in fact only blindly following the law or should we own up to our reluctance to change things for the better? The former option is simply ignoring the oncoming train that the trend of prison suicide is indicative of, but keeping steady, hoping with naive hope that it might miss us, while the latter option acknowledges that when we set up any bureaucratic system, it needs constant and concerted refinement and that we have neglected to do so with our prisons. Should be a simple decision, yes?
- Fourth-year psychology student Thomas Hansen