peripathetic

Harold Shipman Dead - Suicide watch for all murder prisoners?
Harold Shipman, the UK doctor who murdered over 200 of his elderly or incapacitated patients over several decades, was found dead in his cell at Wakefield Prison this morning. He appeared to have hanged himself.

While the breaking news has raised questions over whether or not he should have been placed on 'suicide watch', a practice whereby prisoners judged to be at risk of harming themselves are checked every 15 minutes, the reasons behind the practice itself are, to me at least, unclear. Such prisoners will often spend the rest of their natural lives in jail, segregated from society permanently because they are judged to be such a risk to the public good.

Disregarding, for the sake of argument, the view that suicide should always be prevented, what is the logic behind keeping a prisoner alive for no other reason than that they will live out their sentence invisibly behind the high walls of a jail? Punishment as eventual rehabilitation? That doesn't make sense. They'll never be let out anyway. Punishment because we just feel like making their lives a misery in return, for no other reason? That isn't allowed.

Suicide watch: a practice with logic behind it or not?