Overview

Suicide in prison is a growing problem across the developed world. Originally published in 2001, this book sets out to enlarge understanding of the complexities of suicidal feelings and of the part played by some inalienable features of prison life. It does this by presenting and analysing prisoners’ accounts of their most intimate responses to the deprivations of prison, in particular the stringent control and management of their personal time and space. These accounts show, in more graphic form than previous literature, the depth of suffering as well as the range of creative responses produced in prisoners through interaction with the prison environment. Prisoners themselves have enormous need for more humane and interactive management of the problem, and their accounts show clearly how prisoner expertise could be utilised in profoundly significant ways. This book will be of interest to all who research, live or work in prison, as well as to students and practitioners in criminology, penology, criminal justice, sociology, psychology, psychiatry and health.

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9781032803098

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Reviews

Review for the original edition: This work makes a major contribution to our understanding of prison suicide and self-harm. While based on research undertaken in England, its findings are surely universal, as they properly identify suicide and self-harm as products of the very process of imprisonment itself; and I can think of no recent text where the pains of confinement are better explored than in the interviews which are at the core of Diana Medlicott’s narrative. In the measured, authentic exchanges between tellers and listener, some striking and revealing truths about suicide and self-harm unfold. This is one of the best pieces of scholarship to emerge from the Middlesex School of Criminology for many a long year. – Professor Mick Ryan, University of Greenwich, UK

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