Suicides in NY Prisons More Than Doubled Last Year, New Data Shows

“The dashboard reveals a very troubling trend of increasing numbers of suicides, which should lead corrections administrators to dig deeply into the reasons for the rise and to propose strategies for preventing and reducing the number of deaths,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.  

“By making this data visible to the public, CANY is providing a window not only into conditions behind bars, but also into the hopelessness, despair, and trauma experienced by many of those incarcerated in New York’s prisons,” she added.