Suicide

In today's prison system, suicide is one of the saddest realities that our world has to offer.The amount of pain, loneliness, and sorrow that can compel someone to take their own lifeis something that a human being should not ever have to know.

The utter despair that must drive this dark abyss to exist in a person is something thatshould demand from us a need to understand and a need to prevent. This should be agiven, but in prison where compassion is an endangered species, there are very few that ahurt soul can turn to.

From the guards to the mental health staff, they have come to look at those incarcerated asa one-bill-fits-all. There is no individualism when it comes to many staff members. Theyare taught not to believe anything those "in blue" say, so when an inmate goes to them andtells them they are feeling like killing themselves, there are some staff members that saythings like, "Show me, don't tell me", and the inmate walks back to the dorm, ties a sheet toa pipe 30 feet up in the air from the second tier around his neck and leaps off the guard rail.

There are those who are in such an empty and lost state, that they slice open their veins tobleed out in the isolation of their cells just to end the misery that prison presents. Some saythey should have thought about that before they did the crime, but is our prison systemsupposed to bring this level of despair...or was it meant to bring hope.

The Compound Interest Effect for society turning a blind eye to this "unfortunate" situationthat the inmate put himself in, is something we as a society miss much of the time. Whenthe effects of prison establish this type of mindset in an individual and they fail in theirmission to take their own life, they are forever scarred by what got them to that point.There are very few that can come back from that abyss and when they are released fromprison they come back to us.

Too often, the prison does not worry about what the inmate will do upon release, theysimply say "We'll be here when he comes back". This detachment from putting society firstis what Society-First is all about changing. We want a system that puts us first ineverything it does.

Some say the answer is to just leave them in prison where they belong, yet the CompoundInterest Effect of this is what has brought us to this point. This mindset has failed and hasonly multiplied the negative effect with broken homes and parentless children being raised by other children and a future of second offenses.