Over the summer I attended the Social Change conference hosted by IHS. By far my favorite lecture of the week was by Richard Bell a recent Harvard graduate working on the historical and social significance of suicide in colonial America.
Bell, read a chapter from his upcoming book that focused on suicides amongst prison inmates on death row (no wonder I found it interesting). Bell used source materials that were both chilling in their own right and spun together in a profoundly subtle narrative. It seemed that Bell’s intention was to give insight into the questions “why so much suicide, why in this place, and why at this time?” by drawing focus to these under recognized sources.
I’d like take a bolder approach and discuss what I thought lay beneath the surface of Bell’s work.
First, America’s unique legal evolution left plaintiffs and defendants without a way to express their preferences over justice and penal sentences. As Sudha Shenoy likes to point out, America’s legal history is strange compared to the rest of the world. Social Historian, Lawrence Friedman has also noted that America is the only Western country to have begun its legal history with a fully state-sponsored prosecutor from the get go. Everywhere else went through early stages of institutions where criminal law was a more active process between individual citizens. Victims took criminals to court and voiced there requests for compensation in the courts. Dr. Shenoy informs me this was somewhat the case up until the mid 1980s in England. With police officers laying personal responsibility for pressing charges against criminals.
So when I heard Bell describe how death row inmates felt helpless and without options to the point where they expressed their last sense of control through suicide this legal history shot to mind.
Second, the self reported motivations behind the wardens, sheriffs and town-leaders of the time stunk of private interest motivations couched in public interest rhetoric. Bell found the newspapers and the public announcements of the town leaders. They would torture and mutilate the corpses of the dead inmates in full public eye. They claimed that the suicides were an attack against the civic order.
The Public Choice economist inside of me thought “those self-interested loons.” How better to protect the role of the current administration than to threaten the citizenry? The torture effectively said you can’t escape the state authority even in death.
The bottom line is I thought Bell’s empirical puzzle was a fascinating one, and his analytical narrative a compelling story that could be made all the more powerful with a pinch of Austro-Public Choice insights. This morning I read about two oddities in current events that seem similar. First, suicides of army members is at a 26 year high, and second there seems to be a glut of serial killings in the former Soviet Union as of lately.