Politics Elections

CNN in 2017: 8% on Suicide Watch Follow Through

David Caron

With Jeffrey Epstein’s questionable suicide this morning, rumors are swirling about how something like this could have happened. It was initially reported that he was on suicide watch and then he wasn’t. If he had been, he would likely still be alive. Politics Elections uncovered a 2017 article from CNN that was written in the days after Aaron Hernandez killed himself at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. 

In that article, they link to a report (which now comes up a broken link) that apparently said, About 8% of inmates in local jails were on suicide watch when they took their own lives, according to the 2010 report, which analyzed nearly 700 jail suicides in 2005 and 2006.

According to the article, overall, suicides accounted for 7% of deaths in state prisons in 2014, according to a report (PDF) published (December 2016) by the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. This comes to about 20 per 100,000 state prisoners.

CNN spoke with Christine Tartaro, a professor of criminal justice at Stockton University and an expert on suicide in correctional facilities, for the story and she shared that, “Jails have special challenges, assigning a jail guard to watch one inmate may be a bigger drain on resources, than in a prison where inmates are housed long-term.”

While that may be true, it seems unbelievable that such a prisoner who actually had made an attempt would not be under constant surveillance, and that doesn’t even take into account how important it was that justice would be served, given the attention surrounding the case and the number of victims involved.

Paul Joseph Watson has uncovered information where the Metropolitan Correctional Center has a protocol for this situation.

Under the Metropolitan Correctional Center’s own rules, prisoners on suicide watch are to be kept under “direct, continuous observation.” #Epstein

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