The Sandra Bland story I wrote about yesterday got me looking more into jailhouse suicides. Before I go on, a quick caveat: As I mentioned in my post, the Bland story is still new, and there’s a lot we’re still learning. So I don’t mean to suggest that it’s a foregone conclusion that she committed suicide. That still seems up in the air. Jail suicides are disturbingly frequent and often hard to explain.
I had some exposure to the phenomenon several years ago in my reporting on Steven Hayne, the controversial medical examiner who did 80 to 90 percent of Mississippi’s autopsies for the better part of 20 years. Back in the early 1990s, there was some building media coverage of black people found hanging in jail cells across the state (indeed, across the entire country). Hayne determined that these were suicides. The problem is that Hayne even then had a reputation for pleasing local authorities, so many didn’t find his diagnosis trustworthy. Lloyd White, who at the time was the state’s official medical examiner, was so troubled that he wrote a public letter to the editor of the African American newspaper in Jackson. When I interviewed him in 2006, he said he subsequently reviewed some of the cases for the families of some of the deceased. He determined that they were, in fact, suicides. But he also understood why the families and activists had a hard time believing that.
[For more of this story, written by Radley Balko, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...-jailhouse-suicides/]
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