Ralph Morris had it all planned. After his son’s release from prison he would take the 31-year-old to Spain over the winter months in an attempt to help Tom to overcome an addiction to heroin and crack cocaine. Morris was under no illusion it would be easy, but he had unwavering hope and was wholly committed to ensuring his son would go on to live a clean and happy life after completing his 11-month sentence for shoplifting.
But he was left devastated when Tom was found hanged in his cell at Woodhill prison in June, with just three months left to serve. Now the bereft father lives with profound pain, deep sadness and longing for his adored son.
Morris is one of hundreds of relatives whose lives were irrevocably changed by the loss of a family member in custody last year. There were a record 354 deaths in prisons in England and Wales in 2016. Of these, 119 were apparent self-inflicted deaths – equal to one every three days. These are the highest ever figures of suicides in jail and double the rate in 2012. The official “safety in custody” statistics published last week by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) show that the likelihood of suicide in prison is now almost 10 times higher than in the general population.
HMP Woodhill, a prison in Milton Keynes that opened in 1992 for category‑A male prisoners (the most serious offenders) and those on remand from the surrounding area, had seven self-inflicted deaths in 2016, the highest of any jail. This is not a complete surprise. It is already the subject of a judicial review launched in November by the relatives of two prisoners who took their own lives in July 2015 and August 2016. The claimants are calling for action over safety procedures at the prison.
Woodhill’s Independent Monitoring Board had warned in October that there were “significant problems” at the prison, because of “serious staff shortages” and “increased use of new psychoactive drugs”, which made prisoners prone to violence or self-harm. Coroners’ reports have identified the jail’s repeated failures to comply with the requirements of national policy on suicide and emergency response.
Morris remembers how everything changed on that tragic June night, which he says began with a disturbing phone call from his son. “On 26 June he phoned me and he said, ‘Dad, I have to kill myself tonight,’ in a very calm voice, which was not Tom’s way,” Morris explains. “I begged him not to think like that. I told him I had a visit booked to see him on the coming Tuesday. I said, ‘You’ll be released soon and I’m going to look after you.’” But Tom was found hanged that night.
A fortnight after his death Morris and Tom’s younger brother visited the cell where he had died. “[It was] awful. Terrible.” Morris had hoped the prison was aware of his son’s fragility, particularly as he had learned from a recently released prisoner that Tom had attempted suicide six weeks earlier and was saved by a fellow inmate.
“As soon as you wake in the morning, it’s dark, it’s very dark. I think about Tom every day,” says his father. “My life has changed completely. I haven’t got much enthusiasm for life anymore, I’m afraid. It’s immeasurable [the grief]. I can’t even describe how much it has affected us. He didn’t fall in love, he didn’t do many things in his short life that many of us get to do. We miss him. We really miss him.”
Maureen Cameron is also enduring life without her son, Michael, 45. He was found hanging in his remand cell at Woodhill on 26 April, having spent just 10 days at the prison after being arrested following a domestic disturbance. He died in hospital with his family by his bedside three days later.
Like Morris, Cameron had received a distressing phone call from her son on the day saying he would try to kill himself. “He was crying,” she remembers. “He said his head was all over the place. I said, ‘Don’t cry, but, Michael, promise me one thing, you won’t harm yourself.’ And he said he would promise. Then he said to me, ‘Mum, will you pray for me?’ He asked me to pray for him, and I questioned why he was saying that. Then the same night I got a phone call saying can I get to Milton Keynes hospital because my son is in the critical care unit very, very ill, and could I get there as soon as possible. I just screamed.”
The impact of Michael’s death on his mother has been colossal. She is under the care of a psychiatrist and says she is haunted by visions of Michael dying in the hospital bed and frequently hears things. She says the loss and trauma has changed her life infinitely.
“There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think of him,” she says. “I speak to him all the time. When I go out I say to him, ‘I’m going out Michael, I’m going to the shops, I’ll see you when I get back.’ I even go to the park and look for him, to see if I can find him to bring him home. I hear him talking to me, passing me in my house. I have terrible nightmares, and I see him with the marks around his neck, the marks from the sheet. My heart is broken and it will never mend. I’ll never, ever, be the same person. He was my only boy and he’s gone. At the moment, I can’t imagine anything for the future. I hope and pray to God that my life gets a little bit easier but until I get Michael home it will never be the same.”
But Michael is never coming home, and his grieving mother says she will have to live the rest of her days with “one person missing”.
So too will Dominic Frezza, 24, whose brother, Daniel, was found hanging in his cell last February – five days after arriving at Woodhill. He was taken to hospital but died the following day. He was 28. One of the biggest shocks was that Frezza and his mother had not known Daniel had been arrested until they got the phone call to say he was gravely ill in hospital.
“I struggle to think how bad it must have been to compel someone to do something like that,” says Frezza. “It’s something that sticks with me. It’s not that I’ve learned to accept it, it’s just I don’t like to think that’s what happened. I like to shield the thought from my head of what the truth is. In my eyes, he died before he left the prison. That was the worst thing by a long way. It is just a horrible feeling that Daniel’s death was unnecessary. It was a waste of so much that could have been good. There was a lot of good in him. He was the sort of person who thrived on helping people. He never had anything but he would help people who had even less than him. Yeah, he was really good at that. I feel like the real him was hidden by a lot and maybe somehow that could have come out, but that never will.”
An inquest into Daniel’s death late last year concluded that there was a failure by both the healthcare staff and prison officers to carry out an adequate risk assessment for self-harm and suicide, and a failure to refer him for an urgent mental health assessment. Inquests into the deaths of Michael and Tom will take place this summer.
The MoJ last week launched an internal inquiry into the mental health backgrounds of prisoners who killed themselves. An MoJ spokeswoman said: “We’ve put in place measures to help support prisoners who are at risk of self-harm or suicide, especially in the first 24 hours when they are at their most vulnerable. We are also investing more in specialist mental health training for staff.” She added that HMP Woodhill had introduced new measures, including giving prisoners access to specially trained staff for their first night, NHS services and mental health support.
Both Frezza and Morris hope that raising awareness about what happened to their loved ones will ensure people in the same desperate situation get the help and support they need for family members with mental health problems and drug addictions who are serving a prison sentence.
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
