ABSTRACT
One of the limitations of previous prison suicide research has been that characteristics found to be associated with suicide in the community fail to distinguish prison suicides and suicide attempters from the rest of the prison population, who share many of these features. Most studies have lacked control groups, so it is impossible to know whether the alleged characteristics of suicides and suicide attempters are merely reflecting characteristics of the prison population group from which they are drawn. Prison suicides may in any case have a different profile from suicides in the community, on which the development of the prisoner suicide profile has been based. It is apparent from the previous chapters that criminal justice variables such as offence type, sentence length and so on, are of little help in the identification of inmates at risk of suicide. Other factors and characteristics should be explored.
