FBI joins probe of woman's jail cell death; how frequent are prison suicides?
The FBI has joined an investigation of the jailhouse death of a Chicago-area woman arrested after police in Texas pulled over her car for failing to signal a lane change.
The family of the woman, Sandra Bland, has ordered an independent autopsy after authorities said her July 13 death was a suicide, her lawyer told ABC News. Bland, of Naperville, Illinois, had traveled to Texas for a job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University.
Authorities have said Bland was arrested after being pulled over in Prairie View, Texas, on July 10 after becoming combative and kicking the officer, the Chicago Tribune reports. Now, however, the trooper who arrested Bland has been put on desk duty for allegedly violating the department’s “courtesy policy.”
A friend told KHOU that Bland called him from the Waller County jail on July 10 and said the police officer who pulled her over told her to put out her cigarette. “She had an exchange of words and it just went downhill,” said the friend, LaVaughn Mosely. “She said he snatched her out of the window and slammed her on her face.” A video said to be of her arrest captures the arrestee yelling that the officer had slammed her head to the ground.
Authorities concluded that Bland used a plastic bag to hang herself, says Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis. Jail video doesn’t capture the hanging, but it does show no one entered or left Bland’s cell until a guard found her unconscious, Mathis said. Waller County Sheriff Glenn Smith has said guards used an intercom to check on Bland less than an hour before she was found.
Bland previously said in a Facebook video that she was suffering from “a little bit of depression” as well as post-traumatic stress disorder. Family members, however, don’t believe she committed suicide.
The Chicago Tribune has coverage of a prayer walk for Bland attended by hundreds of people on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post has statistics on jail suicides, a tragedy it calls “disturbingly frequent.”
As of 2011, the last year when statistics were available, the rate of jail suicides was 43 per 100,000. That’s lower than in 1986, when it was 107, but 18 percent higher than in 2009. About a fifth of those who kill themselves in jail are facing minor changes.
Men are more likely than women to commit suicide in jail, while whites are three times more likely than blacks to kill themselves in jail.
Lindsay Hayes, project director of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, told the Post that the jailhouse suicide rate has probably declined because of better intake screening, monitoring and access to mental health officials. But more needs to be done, he said.
“Most of the time, these suicides could have been prevented,” Hayes said. “If you peel back the onion, you usually find that there was unmentioned information that should have been discovered.”
Hat tip to the Marshall Project.
Updated at 1:10 p.m. to correct reference to gender of Bland’s friend.
