Well gee Dave, if you're going to apply this policy to everyone in jail, that would mean that shoplifters, and people arrested for being drunk in public or for disturbing the peace should be counseled to kill themselves and be provided with easy access to cyanide capsules....All of our jails and prisons should have "Suicide Counselors," and suicide pills should be freely provided.
Well, call me a bleeding heart Democrat, but I've got some issues with that...
I disagree generally with the idea of allowing (or encouraging) those who are incarcerated to commit suicide...(with one possible exception)
People are in jail or prison for a wide range of reasons....
At one end of the spectrum, you have first time non-violent offenders, people doing maybe 2-3 years for something like forging checks or drug addicts using stolen prescription pads...
People like that can be rehabilitated, and might want to kill themselves just because they're depressed and they feel hopeless about their temporary circumstances of incarceration...
At the other end of the spectrum....
You have the hardcore violent types doing Life or multi-decade stretches....
We shouldn't let them commit suicide for the same reason that Castro shouldn't have been able to get away with it...
It's not up to that lot to decide when their sentence should be up; they don't deserve the right to make that decision. (Now with folks in this category, if a fellow inmate should happen to make that decision for them...Jeffrey Dahmer comes to mind... hey, what can you do? Boys will be boys...)
Now, the one category where I could see an exception being made is for inmates on Death Row....
If a person sentenced to death wants to perform what would probably be the first civic minded act of their lives and save the state some trouble and expense by offing themselves on their own, it seems gratuitous to insist that they continue to hang around....(since death is what they've been sentenced to anyway...)
