237 by Keramet Reiter

Author:Keramet Reiter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Madness and Suicide

The people I have corresponded with and interviewed, such as Rene Enriquez and Johnny, are survivors, but many prisoners do not survive. Life in isolation is stark, and suicides are common. In general, the California Department of Corrections does not report whether suicides in a particular prison took place in the isolation units or in the general population sections.32 But snapshot data about the mental health care provided to prisoners suggests that suicide rates in California’s isolation units are much higher than those in the general prison population. In 2004, Craig Haney, a leading expert on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, testified in Coleman v. Schwarzenegger that 73 percent of all suicides in California prisons that year took place in isolation units.33 In total, eighteen prisoners committed suicide in 2004 while in isolation in California.34 Despite almost a decade of litigation about inadequate mental health care in the California prison system, especially for prisoners in isolation, the numbers were no better in 2014. Of the fourteen suicides that had been reported by August of that year, eleven, or 79 percent, took place in isolation.35 (Short- and long-term isolation units together account for only 10 percent of California’s prison population.)

These deaths are often the culmination of years of untreated mental illness. “Untreated” is, perhaps, too neutral a word. More precisely, these suicides often follow years of punishment for being mentally ill.36 In 2014, a federal judge found that California prison officials had developed a practice of pepper-spraying mentally ill prisoners and putting them in isolation instead of providing them with treatment.37 One such prisoner, Joseph Duran, died in a “mental health crisis bed”—functionally, a short-term isolation cell—in California’s Mule Creek State Prison. Prison officials labeled his death a suicide because he died after he pulled a tracheal tube out of his neck and forced other objects into the hole where the tube had been. But Duran apparently did this because he had been left in his cell, drenched in pepper spray, which likely burned especially intensely in his tracheal hole—and because he had a known mental illness.38

Between 1989 and 2006 there were 434 prisoner suicides in California. An additional 5,561 prisoners attempted suicide. No one knows how many of these suicides and attempts took place in some kind of isolation unit. But the estimates provided in 2004 and 2014 in the Coleman litigation suggest that some 70 percent—roughly 300 suicides—likely occurred in isolation.39 Scholars estimate that 50 percent of all prisoner suicides throughout the United States take place in either short- or long-term solitary confinement, even though, as in California, these prisoners make up only 10 percent of the nation’s prison population.40

The high rates of suicide in isolation likely relate to the high rates of mental illness in prisons generally, and especially in isolation. Only 4 percent of the U.S. population has a serious mental illness.41 By contrast, 25 percent of all prisoners have a serious mental illness. And 33 to 50 percent of all prisoners in isolation do.

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