Prison Suicide and Prisoner Coping

Abstract

An exploration of prison suicide can offer a variety of significant insights. It can help in the development of suicide prevention policy, but may also help in the broader understanding of the nature of prisons. There is an "additional strain" of imprisonment, and identifiable groups of prisoners are especially susceptible to it. There are discontinuities between the literature on adjustment to imprisonment and the literature on suicides in prison. Bringing together the separate literatures on coping, on suicide, and on the prison experience strengthens our appreciation of the distress suffered in prison and some of the reasons for it. The figures show relatively high and increasing rates of prison suicides, particularly among sentenced, and notably, life-sentence prisoners. Our profile of the suicidal prisoner is incomplete and biased. Different types of prison suicide can be identified, and problems of coping with various aspects of imprisonment take on special significance for some of these groups. Apparently mundane (or routine) features of the prison world can make huge demands on limited coping resources.

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