Last week, government figures illustrated that prison suicides in England and Wales had reached a record high. The rate of suicide in our prisons has doubled since 2012. Other signs of our prison crisis have also been well documented: increased violence; use of new psychoactive substances; and a series of riots.

Some consider prisoners to be a group not worthy of wider concern, and may even welcome these signs of prison crisis, perhaps thinking that harsh and unsafe conditions for prisoners are desirable (‘lock ’em up and throw away the key’). But, whatever your personal politics or opinions on individual prisoners, these rocketing levels of death in our prisons are problematic for us all.

I see the human cost and consequences of prison suicides as the key concern. Hennie Fenlon was 15 when her dad Robert died in HMP Woodhill in 2016. She explains her personal experience in this video. Robert was one of the seventeen men who have taken their own lives at HMP Woodhill, since May 2013. Karen Revell’s son Greg died on his second night in HMP Glen Parva in 2014, an institution which our Chief Inspector of Prisons deemed ‘unsafe’. Her experience is shown in this video. Hennie, Karen, and the friends and family of the other men and women who have died in our prisons aren’t guilty of any crime, but they are left to cope with the loss of their loved ones in problematic circumstances.

Furthermore, each self-inflicted death in prison comes at an enormous cost to the public purse. The cost of the 95 prison suicides which occurred between 2014 and 2015 has been estimated at £300 million. Dealing with suicides consumes an enormous amount of prison staff time, and takes them away from their usual duties. The involvement of prison staff in the police, ombudsman and coroner investigations which follow each prison suicide regularly drags on over months and even years and can be very stressful for the staff and families involved. Although there has been little rigorous investigation in this area, anecdotal evidence indicates that prison staff can become burnt out or even brutalised by repeated involvement in self-harm and suicide attempts.

Legal representation for the Prison Service and associated organisations at inquests into prison suicides is hugely expensive for the state even though there is significant inequality of arms in these situations, as the bereaved family may not be able to access their own lawyer at all. Suicide attempts can also leave people injured, perhaps requiring life long treatment and support. For example, Mr JL was remanded in custody at Feltham Young Offender Institution in 2002, so hadn’t yet been convicted of a crime. He was found hanging from the bars of his cell window a month later. He had stopped breathing and was successfully resuscitated, but was left with serious brain damage through deprivation of oxygen and rendered incompetent to conduct his own affairs.

Given that we are all vulnerable to mental health difficulties, the case of the young father Dean Saunders, who killed himself during his first time in prison in 2016, is particularly sobering reading. Dean suddenly began suffering acute mental ill health difficulties, a hospital bed could not be found for him, and he was imprisoned, where his health deteriorated further. We will never know whether Dean’s mental health problems could have been successfully treated, but his family and young son did not have the opportunity to find out. This short video tells their story.

Tragedy inside prison walls doesn’t just stay locked up in there, but ripples out far beyond them to create vicious cycles of damage and despair. There is absolutely no mystery about what we can do to reduce the number of suicides in our prisons, the mystery is why we are allowing these tragedies to keep occurring. We need to bring about public and political acknowledgement that prison suicides matter for all of us.

Philippa Tomczak is Criminology Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield’s School of Law and an Associate Fellow at the Crick Centre. This piece was first published on the Crick Centre Blog on 7 February 2017. Her research on prison suicides was presented to media experts as part of the PSA’s Total Exposure initiative. She tweets @philippatomczak. 

Image: Ye Jinghan