JJ08 - Blood Money by Michael Lister

we’re gonna place them in an SOS cell for observation. It’s why we have so few suicides at this prison—that and the great mental health care I provide them. But if a guy really wants to do it, all he has to do is act normal and when no one’s looking do the deed.”
    “So Jacobs hadn’t threatened anything?”
    “Not a thing,” she said, shaking her head.
    Unlike me, Hahn kept her entire library in her office at the prison. Mine was strung out over every room of my trailer. Her books were neatly stacked on nice bookshelves that stood against every wall of her office. She had works by Freud, Jung, Rogers, Fromm, Erickson, and Zimbardo, and titles like Social Psychology, Psychology and You, Short-Term Psychotherapies for Depression, Crime and Delinquency, and Child Sexual Abuse .
    “He seeing you for anything?” I asked.
    She shook her head again. “I think Dr. Baldwin was seeing him. I can ask her for you, but it’d probably be better if you saw her. She can tell you a whole lot more about this than I can. She’s worked inside prisons for over ten years. She teaches the suicide prevention class for the staff.”
    I noticed that mixed in among her psychology textbooks and testing and diagnostic manuals, she had numerous modern pop psychology books as well: works by Peck, Bradshaw, and Moore, none of which surprised me. What did surprise me were all the self-help relationship books—new additions since my last visit. I smiled when I saw the spine for Ten Men Who Mess Up a Woman’s Life .
    Following my gaze, she said, “ What ?”
    “ Am I one of the ten?”
    “Huh?”
    I pointed to the book.
    “Of course not. You’re one in seven billion. Wish we could’ve given it a real go.”
    “You think we didn’t?” I asked.
    She laughed. “You kidding? Of course we didn’t.
    Can’t when one’s heart already belongs to another.”
    “ Sorry about that.”
    “No you’re not,” she said. “And now you’re with her and all is right with the world.”
    “Are you . . . Do you want to talk about it?”
    We hadn’t dated much and had never gotten serious in any way, but maybe I had missed something that she needed to process.
    “Said everything I had to say,” she said. “Would you say it again?”
    “Wish we’d’ve gotten a real go. That’s it. No big deal.
    You wanna know about suicide or not?” I smiled at her.
    She smiled back.
    “I’m very cynical regarding suicide in general, but especially in prison,” she said. “It’s all about manipulation. About getting what they want. Most of the threats we get are from inmates in confinement, and every one of ’em are trying to get a transfer. That’s what it’s become—a way to get a transfer. It’s not even a cry for attention or help, just a way to beat the system. Some of them even scratch at their wrists a little, but it’s so superficial it’s laughable. And yet we have to treat everyone the same as if it were a genuine threat.”
    I nodded.
    “They’re placed in the isolation cell,” she continued. “Either by us or by Medical if it’s at night and we’re not here, in which case we have to see them within one hour of arriving at the institution the next morning. They get a complete physical, and we give them a complete mental status evaluation.”
    “You mind walking me through the procedures?”
    “ We have two isolation cells. S-1 and S-2. S-1 is for those who’ve made an actual attempt. S-2 is for those who’ve just made verbal threats. In S-1 they are monitored every fifteen minutes, S-2, every thirty. In both cells, they’re in there naked and without any of their property. They’re given a canvas shroud sewn with nylon thread, a canvas blanket, and a plastic mat on the bare floor. Usually, within two days they realize we’re not going to transfer them and they’re begging us to put them back in confinement.”
    “Which you do?”
    “Which we do gladly. Even if they wanted to kill themselves in that situation it