Some facts about jail suicides:
...statistics show that suicides in jails were “heavily concentrated in the first week spent in custody (48%), with almost a quarter of suicides taking place on the day of admission to jail (14%) or on the following day (9%).’’
The highest suicide rates are found in the smallest facilities, perhaps because those facilities have small staffs and are unable to keep watch over troubled inmates.
http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/throwing-away-young-people-prison-suicide/
The Challenges
*Smaller jails have higher suicide rates.
*5 times higher in jails holding less than 50 inmates.
*These account for 14% of jail suicides. (BJS, 2005)
*Many jails do not provide suicide prevention training or do not provide it annually.
( NIC, 2010)
Most jails have a suicide prevention policy, but many are not comprehensive. (NIC,2010)
http://www.usmarshals.gov/prisoner/jail_suicide.pdf
There is a disproportionate incidence of suicide in county jails:
When standardized per 100,000 inmates, jail suicides happen at more than three times the rate of suicide in state prisons, national studies find.2 Even after adjusting for differences associated with age, gender, and ethnicity, suicide is the only cause of death that occurs at a higher rate in local jails than in the U.S. general population.3 In fact, a comprehensive study on jail suicide by leading correctional suicides expert Lindsay Hayes suggests this rate of jail suicide is as much as three times the rate in the general population (page 2).
Numerous studies suggest that, when standardized by average daily population, the nation’s smallest jails have a suicide rate more than six times the rate in the nation’s largest jails.24 Jail size and suicide rates, it turns out, are closely related throughout the entire range of jail sizes: as jail size increases, suicide rate falls (page 6).
While only 29 percent of other jails deaths occurred with single cell inmates, 58 percent of suicide victims were housed in a single cell. Multiple occupancy housing appears negatively correlated with jail suicide, suggesting its potential use as a preventative tool.
Hanging or strangulation is the dominant method of suicide in Texas county jails. Of the 102 suicides that occurred between 2005 and September of 2009, over 87 percent happened by hanging or strangulation (page 7).
See Table 1: Summary of Risk Characteristics for Texas Jail Suicides on page 9.
Understanding the triggers for inmate suicide is challenging, as they vary greatly from inmate to inmate. Suicides are often spontaneous and notoriously difficult to forecast. Clearly the categorical predictors in this study are only a handful of pieces in a much larger puzzle. Some stressors may come from the jail environment itself where isolation, loss of control, conflict with other inmates or staff, frustration with legal proceedings, or distress and shame over incarceration may flare suicidal tendencies.
Still other causal variables lie outside of the state’s involvement. Roughly half of all jail inmates grew up in single-parent households. Half have a family member who has been incarcerated. Many have suffered from past physical or sexual abuse, and nearly seven in ten have substance abuse problems.33 Family troubles, loss of employment, mental health issues, and a host of other factors may be driving the decision to commit suicide.
For all these reasons, many of those who study correctional suicides in pursuit of practical predictive profiles, including the TCJS, Lindsay Hayes, and others, are wary of placing too much faith in the forecasting capacity of a few demographic variables. This reluctance, however, is not to say that preventative measures cannot be taken. The next section attempts to distill and adapt a number of suicide-prevention practices for use in Texas county jails (page 9).
http://www.lbjjournal.com/sites/default/files/files/Dillon_A portrait of suicides in Texas Jails.pdf
