• Question: Do you get to actually visit inside prisons to talk to the prisoners? and if so is that not scary, walking into a place where lots of criminals have murdered or committed some kind of crime. Also could you tell me a bit more about how your actually trying to figure out why suicidal thoughts and thinks like that goes though criminals minds more than the outside world.

    Asked by anon-182782 to Laura on 27 Jun 2018. This question was also asked by anon-182795.
    • Photo: Laura Hemming

      Laura Hemming answered on 27 Jun 2018:


      I do get to visit inside prisoners and talk to the prisoners yes, and yes it sometimes can be scary! But the people I speak to are generally happy to speak to me – mainly because I’m totally separate from the prison and their procedures. I also try to see each person as an individual – the same as you or I and try to forget about the crime that they have committed.

      In terms of what we’re doing to figure out why prisoners might have more suicidal thoughts, there are a few different things we’re doing. Firstly, we have a theory that the way that people talk about and recognise their emotions might have an impact on how often you think about suicide. For instance, some research shows that if you’re not very good at recognising and discussing your emotions then you are more likely to think about suicide. We think that people in prison are more likely than people outside of prison to recognise and discuss their emotions, so we’re going to try and measure this to see if this contributes to suicidal thoughts. Also, we’re doing ‘qualitative’ interviews with prisoners. This is where we will ask prisoners much more open ended questions which will give them a chance to tell us about their experiences of feeling suicidal in prison. We’ll then try and analyse what people have told us to try and find out what makes these people feel suicidal in prison.

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