Utilizing Peer Safety Companions to Prevent Suicide in Prisons.

A variety of strategies have been implemented to identify, target, and prevent suicide in correctional settings. In recent decades, some prisons have adopted policies that use other incarcerated individuals to support people who have been identified as being at high risk of suicide. There has been little research on these policies and, of the few studies that have been conducted, all have relied on data from a single facility. This study takes a national approach by exploring how many departments of corrections (DOCs) include incarcerated individuals as part of their suicide prevention strategies and the characteristics of those programs. This study is an analysis of suicide prevention policies from state DOCs and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in the United States. The BOP and 15 state DOCs have written policies pertaining to the use of incarcerated individuals as components of suicide prevention programs. These programs differ in their expectations for incarcerated individuals, with some focusing solely on observation of people in crisis and others emphasizing befriending and mentoring.

Comparisons of beliefs in mental health stigma in communities and those who police them.

The police response towards people with mental illness (PwMI) is coming under increasingly intense scrutiny. Numerous jurisdictions have experienced incidents where the police have used force against persons who were exhibiting symptoms of severe mental illness. PwMI are subject to long-held stereotypes and stigma, and recent research indicates these negative attitudes remain, even with training and awareness campaigns. Available literature provides research on citizen and police perceptions of PwMI separately, but no recent studies have compared perceptions of police officers to those held by the members of the communities they patrol. The current study involves a comparison of residents in five southern New Jersey counties and police officers working in these same counties. Both sets of participants responded to a series of statements about perceptions of PwMI. Police were more likely to report supporting stigmatizing views of PwMI than were community members. Negative community response and rejection of police tactics may be rooted partly in differing expectations of treatment towards PwMI in crisis.

Officer Trust Towards Community Members and Critical Incidents: a Comparison of Factors.

Current scholarship suggests attention should be focused on differences in specific job-related conditions to understand help-seeking behavior among police officers. This project examines how officers' feelings of department satisfaction and on-the-job emotions may be associated with trust in members of the community they police. Specifically, officers were asked to report trust levels both in a general sense and in the context of a potential officer-involved shooting (OIS) incident. Print and electronic surveys were completed by 169 police officers across 9 agencies located in 5 New Jersey counties between September 2019 and March 2020. Survey questions covered frequency of on-the-job emotions, satisfaction with department administration, and knowledge of local culture. Bivariate comparisons show officers' levels of both general and post-OIS community trust significantly differ based on reported frequency of emotion, assessment of job satisfaction and department administration, and wider cultural context. Furthermore, multivariate analyses indicate significant factors associated with trust levels include frequency of both positive (fulfillment) and negative (frustration) emotions, satisfaction with training, and attitudes towards the importance of understanding local culture. Findings suggest the complexity of police-community relationships should be more fully explored in relation to supporting aspects of job-related mental wellness in police officers.

Factors that predict murder defendants' competence to stand trial.

One hundred sixty-three homicide case files from The Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ypsilanti, Michigan were examined for evidence of factors associated with the outcomes of Competency to Stand Trial (CST) evaluations. Of the socio-demographic, legal, and clinical factors investigated, only three were significant. Defendants with lower IQs were more likely to be found incompetent to stand trial, and those with more property crime arrests were more likely to be found competent to stand trial. Additionally, defendants who were found incompetent to stand trial were more likely to be accused of killing an intimate or relative.

Suicide on Death Row.

Despite the level of supervision of inmates on death row, their suicide rate is higher than both the male prison population in the United States and the population of males over the age of 14 in free society. This study presents suicide data for death row inmates from 1978 through 2010. For the years 1978 through 2010, suicide rates on death row were higher than that for the general population of males over the age of 15 and for state prisons for all but 2 years.

SUICIDE ON DEATH ROW.

For the period 1976-2011, the suicide rate on death rows in the United States was only weakly (and non-significantly) associated with the marriage, birth, divorce, and unemployment rates in the general population. Possible explanations for why social indicators in the larger society might be associated with the behavior of prisoners on death row were discussed.

"Self-execution" and state execution.

In the United States from 1977 to 1999, the suicide rate of death row inmates was not associated with their probability of execution (r = -.25).

An application of Durkheim's theory of suicide to prison suicide rates in the United States.

E. Durkheim (1897) suggested that the societal rate of suicide might be explained by societal factors, such as marriage, divorce, and birth rates. The current study examined male prison suicide rates and suicide rates for men in the total population in the United States and found that variables based on Durkheim's theory of suicide explained prison suicide rates better than suicide rates for total population. Possible reasons for these findings are discussed.

Suicide on death row.

The suicide rate on death row for the period 1976 through 1999 was found to be high (113 per 100,000 per year), some five times higher than the suicide rate for the male population of the United States. The death row suicide rate was predicted by features of the death row population (negatively with the population on death row) and by social indicators of the society as a whole (negatively with birth and divorce rates and positively with marriage rates).