Another prison suicide: Why?

The blog for Oregon's Statesman's Journal has a draft of their Sunday editorial online. This covers the destructive effects of modern "SuperMax" prisons, especially since it appears that people have given up trying to rehabilitate inmates except by means of the most destructive of punishments. And the psychiatrists seem to be there for the most rudimentary of reasons: to make sure they survive long enough to suffer their full sentence. There is no hope of rehabilitation because they don't know how to accomplish this. As an earlier story (linked below) noted about the SuperMax Prisons: "If you didn't have psychiatric problems, it'll probably cause psychiatric problems. And if you do have psychiatric problems, it exacerbates them."

Yet another inmate has died from suicide in an Oregon prison.

That makes 26 in the past 10 years. Four this year alone.

How could this happen?

Just two weeks ago, a Statesman Journal series analyzed common denominators in these suicides. At least two of these factors were involved in Wednesday’s death at Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario: hanging, and an inmate suffering from mental illness.

After reporter Alan Gustafson’s stories appeared on July 8-9, prison officials said that they took such risk factors seriously. State officials detailed a long list of steps being taken to identify suicidal inmates, to get them appropriate treatment and to prevent future suicide attempts.

Yet 21-year-old Nathan Bashaw was able to hang himself in his cell. He took his life during the half-hour between the times that staff members checked on him. He did so in what should have been one of the safest places at Snake River, the prison’s 22-bed psychiatric unit.

What is going on here?

Jana Russell, the administrator of Counseling and Treatment Services for the 13,500-inmate prison system, said Friday that this case shows that a determined inmate will succeed in killing himself despite anything prison staff can do.

“We did everything right and still had this outcome,” Russell said.

How can that be?

According to Russell, Bashaw recently had been in the Disciplinary Segregation Unit — solitary confinement. A case manager evaluated him for suicide risk, which he denied, but the manager moved him to the psychiatric unit anyway. A psychiatrist saw Bashaw two days before the inmate’s death but got no hint that the man planned to end his life.

The Oregon State Police are investigating the incident. But once again, the Department of Corrections must figure out where the system has failed, and fix it.

Officials say they are devastated each time a suicide occurs. Rank-and-file staff are devastated as well, they say. No one wants to stop this chain of events more than they do.

We want to believe them. But it’s hard to square that description with the appalling findings that came out after one bloody jail-cell suicide late last year. The subsequent investigation turned up instances of lax supervision by corrections officers, missed cell checks and falsified logs.

If that was a case of a few bad apples, the officers gave all their coworkers a black eye. If the problem is more widespread, then prison officials are fooling themselves about how far their commitment to prisoners’ safety has spread through the ranks.

Department of Corrections staff members, from secretaries to administrators, get a week of inservice training each year. For the past two years, Russell says, the focus has been on suicide awareness and prevention. That’s good.

But there’s clearly more to do. A commitment to prisoners’ safety must be part of prison culture, day in and day out.

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Online

See this editorial at StatesmanJournal.com for links to the July 8-9 series “Severe Seclusion, Deadly Outcome” and a July 15 editorial.

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Links

For links to the July 8-9 series “Severe Seclusion, Deadly Outcome” and a July 15 editorial, click:

Severe Seclusion, Deadly Outcome - Part 1

Severe Seclusion, Deadly Outcome - Part 2

July 15th Editorial