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| Inmate, 25, uses torn sheet to hang himself at Rikers |
| By New York Times |
| Published: 03/25/2005 |
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A 25-year-old inmate hanged himself in a jail cell on Rikers Island last Friday, a New York City Correction Department spokesman said yesterday. The suicide is the second in the city jail system this year and the fifth in the last 12 months. The inmate, Charon Watkins, had been assigned to what is known at Rikers as the punitive segregation unit, a set of cells meant to hold the most troubled or disruptive prisoners at the jail complex. He hanged himself with a torn bed sheet that he had tied to a sink faucet in his cell at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center, said Thomas Antenen, the Correction Department spokesman. Mr. Watkins, of Jamaica, Queens, had been in jail since Jan. 10, charged with second-degree robbery and drug possession, correction officials said. One Correction Department employee said Mr. Watkins's body had been found with a note nearby, on which he had scribbled the telephone number for his girlfriend. State investigators have for years criticized the city's correction and health officials who work at Rikers for their failure to effectively tackle the problem of suicides, the leading cause of death in the country's jails. Indeed, since 2001, investigators responsible for monitoring jails in the state have become increasingly critical of mistakes at Rikers in overseeing and treating mentally ill inmates, some of whom later killed themselves in their cells. Several state reports repeatedly urged city and Correction Department officials to follow state-issued regulations devised to reduce inmate suicides, and to punish inappropriate medical and mental health care that might have contributed to jail deaths. After six suicides in the first half of 2003, investigators from the New York State Commission of Correction, a panel appointed by the governor to review every inmate death, saved some harsh criticism for Prison Health Services, the publicly held profit-making company that has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars since 2001 to provide medical and mental care at the city's jails. Both the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which oversees Prison Health's work, and correction officials say that since the 2003 deaths they have worked hard to limit suicides, adopting what they say are more stringent oversight controls. Mr. Watkins, who correction officials said had no known mental health problems, was sent to the punitive segregation unit - a dimly lighted jail known as the Bing, where inmates are kept in isolation 23 hours a day - on Feb. 23 after jail officers discovered a sharpened piece of metal in his pocket, said Mr. Antenen, the Correction Department spokesman. |
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