DALLAS — Sawyer Letcher heard voices others couldn’t. They told him to hurt himself.
Trying to silence the clamor in his head, the 19-year-old would bang it against a prison wall in Texas until he bled. He tried to hang himself at least twice before eventually taking his life with bedsheets in his cell in May 2017.
His attempts at suicide were warnings that prison staff neglected to address, according to a lawsuit filed by Letcher’s mother, Keri Womack, against the state prison system and its public health care provider.
Her attorney, Scott Medlock, said Letcher’s death is reflective of a systemic issue plaguing Texas prisons, which he calls ill-equipped to protect people with mental illness. He said the environment is “kind of a powder keg for suicide attempts.”
“The big-picture problem is there are not enough in-patient beds to accommodate all the people” in the system who have severe mental illness, Medlock said.
Suicides in Texas prisons hit a 10-year high of 40 in 2018, and a steady rise in suicide attempts in these state-run facilities alarms prisoner rights advocates.
The number of suicide attempts among Texas inmates logged by authorities has nearly tripled in the last decade, climbing from less than 700 in 2009 to nearly 2,000 in 2018 even as the number of people imprisoned in the state has fallen by 10,000, according to documents the Associated Press obtained from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice last month through a public records request.
Prisoner rights advocates say the rise supports their argument that the prisons in one of America’s most heavily incarcerated states need more outside oversight.
Corrections staff and some elected leaders, however, suggest the increase can be attributed to prison workers being more focused on monitoring a growing number of inmates with serious mental health needs. The officials say the state’s prisons also have changed what they define as a suicide attempt, leading to more attempts being counted.
The Department of Criminal Justice likely “overcounts” suicide attempts as it focuses on preventing actual suicides, said spokesman Jeremy Desel, who declined to comment on the lawsuit filed by Letcher’s mother.
In 2013, Texas started including in its attempted-suicide tally people who say they intend to take their own lives, Desel said. Last year, 88 percent of attempted suicides among Texas inmates did not involve any injuries and less than 2 percent required life-saving measures, he said.