Suicides are the third leading cause of death in U.S. prisons, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS).
Coming Back From The Edge
“I began playing around with the idea of killing myself because there’s just no way I can do fifty years.”
A guard discovered Curtis Roberts at count time, working on a bedsheet. He was alone, feeling down, having watched yet another friend go home.
“I sat alone, depression beginning to take its toll,” Roberts remembers. “I began playing around with the idea of killing myself because there’s just no way I can do fifty years.”
He was referring to his sentence of 50 years to life — for a robbery in which he got $40. He sat in his cell trying to figure out the best way to make a hangman’s noose out of the sheet.
The guard, confused, stood watching him, then asked what he was doing. He told the guard that he was practicing for when he really wanted to kill himself. The guard opened the cell door and ordered Roberts to turn around. He placed him in cuffs.
“He was really polite about it,” Roberts says.
Roberts was escorted to the nurse’s office, where he waited for about half an hour. After a psychological evaluation, his doctor placed him on a suicide watch. The nurse gave him a gown that used Velcro fasteners. There were no shoes or socks to wear; no soap to wash up with.
At the beginning of the ordeal, Roberts felt protected, “safe, seen and heard,” but the experience also made him feel uncomfortable, even belittled.
If you are curious about prison life and the real work that goes on there, read The San Quentin News or listen to Ear Hustle.
“There’s a nurse sitting outside the locked room, watching you,” he says. “There’s no TV or any comforts of day-to-day life.” Even his meals were delivered to the room through a metal tray slot.
Every 24 hours, medical personnel, including doctors and counselors performed a psychological evaluation, a deep dive into a person’s life, a life which for Robert was neglectful and abusive. “I can’t remember my mother telling me that she loves me,” he says. She left the family while he was still young. Later, his suffering multiplied, and he suffered abuse at the hands of his father.
Suicides are the third leading cause of death in U.S. prisons, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), and San Quentin is not immune. Brown and white posters hang in the housing units, dining halls, education area, chapels — all around the prison:
THINKING OF SUICIDE? With Help Comes Hope! HONOR YOUR LIFE — Talk to a friend today! Talk to any staff member now!
Suicide is preventable.
If you know someone suicidal, call National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273–8255 or go to speakingofsuicide.com/resources
The prison aims to address the problem before thoughts of suicide become actions, but people like Robert who have struggled with depression say the resources are not there. While suicide watch is designed to work as an emergency brake, its regular use in prison suggests a systemic failure of the system to address the underlying causes of suicidal thoughts and actions.
While criminal activity often results in prison time, the underlying cause behind criminal acts is often a mental disorder. “Nearly 400,000 of the 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. have a psychiatric diagnosis,” according to Esquire magazine. But “the country’s state-run psychiatric hospitals can only accommodate 38,000 patients.”
In the United States, suicide is now the tenth most common cause of death. Nearly 45,000 Americans age 10 and older died by their own hands in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And for those incarcerated, suicide is the third most common cause of death, according to U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Suicide is preventable.
If you know someone suicidal, call National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273–8255 or go to speakingofsuicide.com/resources
Roberts’ treatment shows one flaw in the ways prisons go about addressing this issue: the process of healing can take time. Roberts has been on suicide watch more than once over his 24 years of incarceration. For him, suicidal thoughts started after he was raped in prison. Though the episodes discussed here happened over a four year period after the rape, he still finds himself struggling with suicidal thoughts — even while medicated.
During one medical exam, Roberts found himself reliving a traumatic experience when he was asked to strip and sit on the examination bed. But the idea of being touched triggered Roberts. He struggled, emotionally, as if it were happening again.
“I felt dirty,” he remembers. “I felt unclean and very small.” When he asked the doctor not to touch him, the doctor asked why. “I feel like killing myself,” he responded. “I was raped.”
Regardless of his surroundings, Roberts’ mind does not wander far from what he learned as a child. Curtis recalls seeing his dad swallow a bottle of rat poison in an attempt to kill himself. Then later seeing his sister be raped and attempt suicide. For him, the logical conclusion was learned in those moments — when life gets rough, suicide is an answer.
While the rape had happened years before, it was still an ever-present possibility, and the complexity of Roberts’ experience with both childhood abuse and prison rape made for a difficult living situation. The doctor recognized the symptoms, and Roberts was placed on suicide watch. For five days, a team examined him daily. After that, he was diagnosed as non-suicidal and returned to the prison’s general population.
For a person placed on suicide watch, the standard protocol has significant physical and emotional consequences. Roberts says the physical restraints were not the worst part. Instead, it was the unsettling risk of transfer. “Mentally, the most difficult part is when ‘the-powers-that-be,’ prison authorities and medical professionals, keep repeating how they think it would be best if I was transferred to another institution,” he says. “They kept saying to each other, ‘we think he’ll be better off at another prison.’ ”
He says a transfer would mean moving away from his only close friend and form of emotional support, and that is the “worst thing that could have happened.” To a person in need, he argues, the suicide watch protocol should only consider transfer as a last resort. He believes San Quentin owes its inmates on suicide watch better treatment.
Taking people's needs into account is not the only way he believes prison authorities could make the process better. “I should have been given credit for standing up, reaching out for help and taking care of myself, not threatened,” he says. “This whole process can be softer, kinder, and less intrusive. It’s hard to be stripped naked in front of people. And it’s hard to be treated like I did something wrong — when all along I’m crying out for help.” That could mean the offer of a phone call, a meal, or a talk with a trusted professional. “One time all I wanted was to color with the female doctor,” he says. “Yeah, you heard right, color with crayons.” Roberts needed to express his pain physically, not by hurting himself, but with art.
After being placed on suicide watch multiple times over a four-year period, Roberts has finally found healing from a surprising source outside of the health care system — in this case, through the Ear Hustle podcast, which boasts millions of listeners.
Recently, after being featured on that podcast, Roberts received a large packet of mail. He opened it expecting to find an invitation to a class reunion. Instead, to his surprise, it was filled with letters — “heartfelt letters from students and their teacher, high school students writing to me, a convicted felon,” he says. “They wrote as if they knew me, each of them pouring their hearts out. The letters helped me tremendously. I felt special being acknowledged — yes, I felt very special.”
His English teacher sent a cover letter and explained that her class used the podcast as a teaching tool. And when Roberts wrote back to tell her about this miracle flood of letters, she responded saying that the students were “overjoyed” to learn he had also graduated from their school and were eager to stay in touch even after his release.
Roberts responded, detailing his happiness and emphasizing to the students how much their own stories matter. “If somehow my mistakes helped one student change their life and not become incarcerated, then my life matters,” he says.
And the class had another surprise: they sent Roberts his yearbook photos from 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980. “I think I cried more from seeing the Curtis who had no idea about what’s to come his way,” he says, “than my seeing the Curtis who looked so young.”
Where is Curtis now?
Before Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. left office, Curtis received a commutation of his sentence and was home for the holidays.
If you’d like to see how he was married within a year of his release, listen to Episode 30: I Want the Fairy Tale
How does dating work in your 30s when you’ve been locked up since you were 15? How soon do you share your incarceration history with new love interests? And how the hell does online dating work? Recently released men and women muse about all of it, and one former San Quentin inmate tries to make a beeline from the gates to the altar.
- Originally published in the San Quentin News — WALL CITY, May 2019*
Free of the twin distractions of mobility and community, I spent my time pondering deep concepts — one was survival on the Main Line in an infamously famous and brutal prison, San Quentin.
If you like this article and want to read more such articles without any restrictions, why not consider becoming a Medium member (if you are not one already) by using my referral link below?
I get a portion from your monthly fee at no extra cost to you and it will go a long way in supporting me as a writer.
