Title: Suicide and Suicide Methods in Prison: Inside Prison
Headings: Suicide Methods in Prison
Suicide Methods in Prison
Strangulation
Drug overdoses
Self-inflicted Wounds
Warning Signs

Content: While suicide is more difficult to accomplish in prison, prisoners often employ a number of different and creative methods when attempting suicide. Without easy or legal access to drugs, weapons, or willing assistants, inmates often use painful, even tortuous, methods of ending their lives. Correctional agencies, such as the Prison Service of England and Wales, attempt to moderate inmate opportunity to commit suicide by designing cells with high security window grills, immovable plate- safe ventilators, rectangular, floor-mounted safe-skirting heater pipes, and fixed resin-clad storage units (Burrows, Brock, Hulley 2003). At many prisons suicide assessments are conducted at intake, and if suicidal tendencies are discovered, the inmate is placed in a specially-supervised ward that is periodically checked by staff no fewer than every 15 minutes. Inmates at these wards are usually only allowed hospital-like garments and a single blanket, and are sometimes placed in restraint chairs, if symptoms are severe. It is unclear whether many of these developments work or not. Many of the risk-factors for suicidal behaviour in prisoners resemble those for non-prisoners, such as substance-abuse, mental health facility-admittance, acute psychoses, and psychiatric morbidity  (Shaw, Appleby, Baker 2003); it may be more efficient and cost-effective to assess and monitor these indications on a regular basis than attempt to redesign the living environments of potentially millions of inmates. In addition, many methods of suicide are varied and sometimes ingenious, to the point where many superintendents or wardens have publicly acknowledged that institutions, regardless of how much protection they afford the prisoner, will seldom be "suicide-proof." A spate of these different methods is outlined below.