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Imprisonment and Suicide

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1. Identify the link between imprisonment and suicide. (10)
Prison can cause psychological distress through overcrowding and bullying of over-powering prisoners. There are many coping mechanisms for people who are being bullied in prison e.g. consciously self-inflicted injuries, whereas other prisoners can go straight to suicide because they cannot take it anymore. Research has shown that suicide in Prison is more common than suicide in the general population and this demonstrates that imprisonment and suicide have a clear link.
Dooley conducted a study to find out the link between imprisonment and suicide and whether this was a cause of political reasons. He suspected that many cases in which people had intentionally committed suicide were being judged as death by misadventure and wanted to see if there were real differences in the circumstances surrounding deaths in each group.
He analysed the deaths in prisons across England and Wales from 1972 to 1987 on a checklist and the verdicts given for each death. He compared the verdicts of suicide to other verdicts of unnatural deaths.
Dooley found that there was a high rate of suicides in prison during that time period. He also found that suicide was more common in young, remand prisoners. This is because they would enter the prison as a vulnerable person so the prisoners who had been there longer would perceive them as weak and break them down. These young new prisoners would most likely to be raped and bullied. He found that the group of prisoners labelled as misadventure and the group of prisoners labelled as suicide were similar. So this suggested that some suicides may have been classified and there were no boundaries between the two. The small numbers of differences between groups show that the link between prison and suicide is stronger than we think and this may have been ignored because of the

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