Investigating prison suicides: The politics of independent oversight
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474521993002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Investigating prison
suicides: The politics of
independent oversight
Dominic Aitken
University of Bath, UK
Abstract
This article examines the institutional arrangements in place to investigate prison suicides
in England and Wales, focusing on inquiries by the Prisons & Probation Ombudsman and
coroners’ inquests. The first half of the article is empirical, and draws on a set of elite
interviewswith Prisons & Probation Ombudsman investigators, senior coroners and other
professionals involved in prison oversight. The latter half of the article is theoretical, and
interprets prison suicide investigations as an example of broader trends of counter-
democracy and depoliticisation. I provide a general theoretical overview of these con-
cepts, and argue that Prisons & Probation Ombudsman investigations and coroners’
inquests operate according to a technocratic logic of independence, neutrality and ratio-
nality. The article concludes that prison suicide investigations are narrowlyconcerned w ith
the factual details and administrative minutiae of individual cases, at the expense of more
open ended, less manageable questions about the politics of punishment.
Keywords
counter-democracy, depoliticisation, politics of punishment, prison suicide, technocracy
‘There is really nothing more to say – except why. But since why is difficult to handle,
one must take refuge in how.’ (Morrison, 1970)
Whenever prisoners die unexpectedly, a private tragedy becomes a public inquiry.
In England and Wales, all deaths in custody, whatever the cause, are subject to at
Corresponding author:
Dominic Aitken, Department of Social & Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: da779@bath.ac.uk
Punishment & Society
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474521993002
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2022, Vol. 24(3) 477–497
least one formal investigation by the state. Prison suicides, the focus of this article,
are reviewed first by the Prisons & Probation Ombudsman (PPO), then proceed to
a coroner’s inquest held in front of a jury (Tomczak, 2018). Whatever else they do,
suicides in prison prompt a great deal of bureaucratic administration, and illustrate
how ‘[w]hen someone dies a small drama is set in motion’ (Bradbury, 1999, p. 46).
The cast includes a coroner, police officers, civil servants, medical experts and
inquest lawyers, all of whom are enlisted after the fact to give meaning to a
rare, shocking event. Guided by principles of independence, neutrality and ratio-
nality, their work is an attempt to build consensus in a situation potentially riven
by conflict, accusation and pain.
The primary purpose of death investigations is to find facts about the exact
circumstances of a person’s demise. The production of facts, like the construction
of official statistics, is an important activity for liberal states. Whereas collective
life in a democracy ‘makes all issues an object of public evaluation and all values a
matter of opinion and consent’ (Urbinati, 2010, p. 65), the precision and specificity
of facts lends them an epistemological authority that is beyond dispute. As Mary
Poovey argues in A History of the Modern Fact (1998), facts are ‘observed partic-
ulars’ that conform to a scientific model of ‘noninterpretive descriptions’ of the
world (1998: xv). In their ideal form, they offer us an objective representation of
social reality, ‘a standpoint on the world from which we have access to the world as
it is in itself, in no way mediated by either our human interests or even our mental
structure’ (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 884). To produce facts about a death in custody,
then, is to find common ground that can unite divided groups.
In practice, producing facts is a demanding task. Reconstructing the circum-
stances of a sudden, and possibly unwitnessed, death in prison is intrinsically dif-
ficult. Custodial sites are by default closed worlds, prone to secrecy and hard for
outsiders to penetrate. They are spaces that combine coercive power with intricate
structures of bureaucratic authority (Crewe, 2011), and where staff have a large
amount of discretion in how they carry out their work (Liebling, 2000). Moreover,
those who manage prisons have a basic interest in avoiding scandal and minimising
sources of criticism (Carlen, 2001). All of these factors are obstacles to compre-
hensive external oversight (Behan and Kirkham, 2016: 446). Nonetheless, formal
inquiries into deaths in custody open prisons up to an unusually high degree of
scrutiny, shedding light on working practices and confidential records that are
ordinarily hidden from view. Since the dead cannot speak, all remaining traces
of the end of their life are identified and pored over by independent investigators.
Paperwork, CCTV footage, roll counts, medication doses, phone calls, cell alarms,
radio transmissions, emergency service arrivals, spatial dimensions of the death
scene, cut-down details, resuscitation efforts, the body itself: all of these fragments
are gathered together as evidence and treated as a mystery to be explained.
Deciphering the meaning of these clues is the work of professionals and experts,
who are called upon to produce objective knowledge about the end of life.
In principle, the individualistic nature of death investigations allows them to be
searching and thorough. Specific decisions can be placed in context and witness
478 Punishment & Society 24(3)
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