California Suppressed Critical Consultant's Report on Prison-Suicide Policies

February 28, 2013 10:16:05 am

Gov. Jerry Brown has pointed to reams of documents to make the case in court and on the stump that California's prison crisis is over, and inmates are receiving good care, but the state suppressed a report from its own consultant warning that prison suicide-watch practices encouraged inmate deaths, the Los Angeles Times reports. Lindsay Hayes, a national expert on suicide prevention in prisons, told corrections officials in 2011 that the state's system of holding suicidal inmates for days in dim, dirty, airless cells with unsanitized mattresses on the floor was compounding the risk that they would take their own lives. His report described in detail inmates being divested of their clothes and possessions and robed in a "safety smock." Hayes concluded that such conditions encouraged prisoners to declare they were no longer suicidal just to escape the holding cells. Many of them took their own lives soon after. "When your report landed, it was not roundly applauded and in fact was buried," Robert Canning, a prison official overseeing Hayes' work, told Hayes last year. There were 32 prison suicides in California in 2012, above the national average.

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California Suppressed Critical Consultant's Report on Prison-Suicide Policies

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