Alliance Alert: The latest report from the Correctional Association of New York (CANY) reveals a heartbreaking and unacceptable reality: the number of people who died by suicide in New York State prisons more than doubled in 2024, reaching the highest total in over two decades.
This data reflects a deepening mental health crisis behind bars—one that demands immediate and systemic action. With nearly one in three incarcerated individuals now on the mental health caseload, it is clear that our correctional system is ill-equipped to meet the behavioral health needs of those in its population. The staggering rates at women’s facilities—where over 70% of the population is receiving mental health treatment—only further emphasize this crisis.
We must recognize that incarceration is not mental health support.
What’s Needed Now
The Alliance for Rights and Recovery calls for:
- Increased investment in mental health services within and outside correctional settings, including suicide prevention, trauma-informed providers, and peer support;
- Expanded diversion and reentry programs, including mental health alternative courts, forensic peer bridgers, and alternatives to incarceration that address underlying conditions and reduce recidivism;
- More offramps from the criminal legal system for people with serious mental health and substance use challenges, who too often cycle through jails and prisons instead of receiving support in the community;
- Full implementation and enforcement of oversight and accountability measures, such as those passed by the legislature, and additional transparency around in-custody deaths.
While the state has taken some steps—including launching a suicide prevention task force and increasing oversight—we must go further. That includes ensuring Governor Hochul signs legislation to improve prison transparency and supports new funding for the services that prevent people from entering or reentering these dangerous environments.
As one grieving family member put it, “He was a sick man — but he was a human, a soldier, a son, and a father.” We owe it to Zechariah Squires and the 24 others who died by suicide last year to treat mental illness with support, not confinement.
Join the Conversation at Our Annual Conference
These urgent issues will be front and center at the Alliance’s upcoming annual conference, where we will host a series of workshops on criminal justice reform, forensic mental health, and alternatives to incarceration. Sessions will explore:
- Strategies to reduce incarceration for people with mental health and substance use challenges;
- Models of community-based support and reentry;
- Legislative and budget advocacy to fund humane, rights-based alternatives.
Unbreakable! Harnessing Our Power, Building Our Resilience, Inspiring Hope and Courage
Alliance for Rights and Recovery 43rd Annual Conference
Villa Roma Resort and Conference Center | September 29-October 1, 2025
Register Today Here!
Stay tuned for more information about speakers and the full program.
It’s time to move away from punishment and toward prevention, healing, and recovery. Let’s end the cycle—and save lives.
Suicides in NY Prisons More Than Doubled Last Year, New Data Shows
By Reuven Blau | The City | August 5, 2025
In a sign of a deepening mental health crisis behind bars, the number of people who died by suicide in New York State prisons more than doubled in the past year, according to newly released data obtained by a prison oversight group.
The Correctional Association of New York (CANY), a nonprofit with a mandate to monitor prison conditions, unveiled a new dashboard Tuesday detailing that 25 people died by suicide in state prisons in 2024 — up from 12 the previous year. That marks a 108% spike from 2023 and the highest total in at least two decades.
The suicide rate — and overall number of deaths behind bars — is rising even as the overall prison population shrinks, suggesting worsening mental health conditions behind the walls, according to prison rights advocates and medical experts.
In 2013, with over 54,000 people incarcerated, the suicide rate was 0.24 per 1,000. By 2024, with the prison population down to about 33,600, the rate had tripled to 0.74 per 1,000.
“CANY’s new dashboard provides visibility into yet another crisis in New York’s prisons: a dramatic increase in suicides coupled with an increasing share of incarcerated people on mental health caseloads,” said Jennifer Scaife, the Associations’ executive director. “The purpose of this dashboard is to provide greater transparency into this crisis so that action can be taken to reduce risk and improve outcomes.”
The data, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request to the state Office of Mental Health (OMH), tracks monthly mental health caseloads, program enrollment, self-harm incidents, suicide attempts and deaths by suicide in facilities operated by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS).
This is the first time such data has been made publicly available in this form.
While the state prison staff typically reaches out to close relatives within 24 hours of a death, members of the public sometimes wait weeks before learning of the latest death behind bars.
As a result, some trends — like a spike in suicides — go unnoticed for months because of the lack of real-time updates.
DOCCS does, upon request, provide reporters with information regarding specific deaths, including the date, time, and location, as well as the county coroner or medical examiner responsible for determining the cause of death. The DOCCS Incarcerated Lookup also indicates if a person has died.
But advocates note that reporters and elected officials typically do not know about fatalities behind bars unless they learn of them through family members or prison staffers.
Some of the deaths are reviewed by the state’s Commission of Correction. But those reviews often take years to complete — and none have been released for 2024 so far.
CANY’s dashboard also shows a steady increase in the share of incarcerated people receiving mental health treatment. As of this year, 29% of the prison population is on the OMH mental health watchlist — up from 26% in 2022.
The numbers are even more stark in women’s prisons.
At Bedford Hills and Albion Correctional Facilities, over 70% of the incarcerated women are on the OMH caseload, state records show. At Taconic Correctional, it’s 62%, the data reveals.
Advocates say the rise in suicides, self-harm and mental health diagnoses reflects not just the conditions of confinement, but also decades of underfunding and a system designed for punishment rather than care.
“The dashboard reveals a very troubling trend of increasing numbers of suicides, which should lead corrections administrators to dig deeply into the reasons for the rise and to propose strategies for preventing and reducing the number of deaths,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
“By making this data visible to the public, CANY is providing a window not only into conditions behind bars, but also into the hopelessness, despair, and trauma experienced by many of those incarcerated in New York’s prisons,” she added.
In response to the new data, DOCCS spokesperson Thomas Mailey said the state agency has taken “aggressive actions” to address suicide prevention across its facilities.
“Any suicide is one too many, which is the reason the Department has taken aggressive actions to combat suicides in DOCCS facilities,” he said in a statement Tuesday afternoon.
Those actions include launching a Suicide Prevention Task Force aimed at creating safer environments and better identifying those at risk, conducting trend analysis and enhanced staff training, and reviewing screening protocols to improve early intervention.
In 2024, the department also contracted suicide expert Dr. Thomas Joiner to assess and update suicide prevention policies and brought in American Correctional Association Mental Health Director Dr. Aufderheide, who recently conducted site visits and is reviewing DOCCS’ prevention plan.
The department is also increasing suicide awareness through new communication campaigns and peer support programs, according to the statement.
Red Flags
Among those lost this year was Zechariah Squires, a 38-year-old Army veteran and father of a young daughter, who was found hanging in his isolation cell at Coxsackie Correctional Facility on Feb. 2, prison records show.
“Why was my daughter’s veteran father found hanging by a cord provided to him while in isolation?” Darci Lindgren, the mother of his child, asked in an email to the Correctional Association.
“He was a sick man — but he was a human, a soldier, a son, and a father,” she added. “The way these facilities treated him is illegal and wrong.”
Squires, who had well-documented mental health and substance use issues following his military service, had previously attempted to take his life in 2021 while in the Albany County Jail, the night before his sentencing, according to Lindgren.
Despite that history — and a toxicology report that showed no antidepressants or any medication in his system — he was placed in isolation, in a cell where he was legally not supposed to be held under the state’s HALT Solitary Confinement law.
“A mental health prisoner should have been in a different cell — and not in isolation,” Lindgren said.
Dr. Marc Stern, a former regional director for the New York state prison system and current faculty member at the University of Washington School of Public Health, cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the raw numbers — but emphasized that the increase should be taken seriously.
“Yes, the number more than doubled — from 12 to 25. And while that’s a relatively small absolute number in a system of 33,000 or more, it should absolutely raise red flags,” Stern told THE CITY.
“Any correctional system seeing a jump like this has a responsibility to dig deep — to ask whether there’s a pattern, a particular facility, a policy change, or a missed red flag that contributed to the spike,” he added.
Stern, who has decades of experience in correctional health, said systemic solutions start with a clear diagnosis.
“You look at geography — are all the suicides happening in one region or one prison? Were these people in mental health units or the general population? Did they die in suicide watch cells — which might point to failures in those very systems meant to protect them — or were they never flagged at all?” he said. “You can’t fix what you don’t understand.”
CANY’s dashboard builds on earlier tools tracking prison deaths, staffing shortages, and use-of-force incidents. The organization, founded in 1844, is one of the oldest prison oversight bodies in the country and is legally empowered to access state prison facilities.
The spike comes as advocates have for years warned about underfunding and understaffing in prison mental health units. CANY has documented repeated delays in treatment, inconsistent suicide prevention training, and facilities ill-equipped to handle psychiatric emergencies.
In 2023, for example, a CANY report highlighted prolonged isolation of people with serious mental illness and a lack of consistent therapeutic programming in several prisons, particularly for women and people with higher acuity needs.
Some reforms are in motion: the state budget increased funding for the State Commission of Correction and the Correction Association.as well as a new mandate for the state-run oversight agency to inspect every facility under its purview at least once per year.
The state legislature also passed a series of reforms in June, including mandating prompt notification to the next of kin following each death. The package of bills also gives the correction commission power to visit prisons with 24 hours notice.
Gov. Kathy Hochul hasn’t said if she will sign the bills into law.
Suicides in NY Prisons More Than Doubled Last Year, New Data Shows | THE CITY — NYC News