On June 13, Robin Hamilton’s 38-year-old son Reginald Pittman Jr. passed away nearly two decades after a suicide attempt at the Madison County Jail left him permanently disabled.
In his last moments, Hamilton told him, “When you go to heaven, be my guardian angel. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.” Pittman blinked once, which meant yes.
Hamilton had been caring for Pittman at their home in Greater St. Louis for nearly 20 years. While he was awake and aware some of the time, Pittman was unable to do anything for himself, and could only communicate by blinking his eyes. Hamilton worked in nursing before Pittman was disabled by the suicide attempt.
In 2008, Hamilton filed a lawsuit against Madison County and jail officials. The lawsuit alleged that the county jail failed to monitor people in its custody who were at risk for suicide and didn’t promptly provide Pittman with a psychiatric evaluation or mental healthcare. The lawsuit went through three jury trials and four appeals over 16 years, and in 2024 a federal court upheld the verdicts for the defendants.
“They destroyed my life and my son’s life,” Hamilton said. “Now he’s gone.”
Suicide is a leading manner of death in correctional facilities, according to a 2025 report from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA), the state agency tasked with tracking in-custody deaths in jails and prisons. According to records ICJIA provided in response to Illinois Answers’ public-records request, at least 30 people died by suicide in Illinois jails between 2019 and 2025. An Illinois Answers analysis of coroner records identified more than two dozen suicides in jails during that time period that were not included in ICJIA data.
People can be driven to “an acute state of distress” by the conditions in correctional facilities, said Miriam Gohara, a law professor at Yale University. The combination of isolation, poor quality food, lack of sunlight or fresh air, and overall stress of the jail environment can make people look for any way out.
A suicide in a correctional facility is “an indictment of the prison’s ability to monitor, assess and provide care for someone who’s suffering from a serious mental health condition,” Gohara said. “Or, they’re being subjected to conditions that are so horrible that they drive themselves to death by suicide.”
Mental illness and substance abuse can be predictors for suicidal ideation. People with mental illness and people with addiction are disproportionately represented in prison and jail populations. Gohara said that makes it even more important for jails to report deaths.
“To the extent that we’re going to continue to rely on incarceration as a response to crime or…even poverty and mental health problems, then we need to know and understand what is happening to people in state, county or federal custody,” she said.
Before his arrest, Hamilton said she’d arranged for Pittman to travel to Colorado for work. When they discovered there was a warrant out for his arrest, she encouraged him to turn himself in before he left the state—a decision that still haunts her.
Robin Hamilton holds a photo of her son, Reginald Pittman. “They did this to my son,” Hamilton said. “My son walked in there on his own free will, and my son should have walked out the same way he walked in.”
While he was incarcerated, Pittman wrote a letter to his girlfriend, whom he called “Frogg.” He wrote that he worried he could be in jail for a whole year before he went to court.
“I don’t want to die in here, Frogg,” Pittman wrote. “Nobody is going to help me.”
In a suicide note Pittman wrote to his grandmother, he said the guards were “fucking with him” and they refused to provide access to a crisis counselor, according to an exhibit filed in Hamilton’s lawsuit.
According to court records, guards found Pittman hanging from a blanket in his cell on December 19, 2007. He suffered an acute anoxic brain injury from which he never recovered.
Before his attempt, Pittman was housed in a cell in one of the jail’s segregation units. According to testimony given by a jail lieutenant during one of the lawsuit’s jury trials, Pittman’s cell was checked every half hour.
Madison County Sheriff Jeff Connor said his office wants to have “zero suicides or suicide attempts” in the jail. He said that the jail works with contractors to provide people detained there with mental health screenings and suicide counseling, and that the jail has a psychiatrist one day a week. Illinois Answers was unable to reach Robert Hertz, who was the sheriff at the time of Pittman’s suicide attempt.
People who are deemed unfit for trial because they have a mental illness often wind up in county jails while they await beds at a state psychiatric facility. Connor said Madison County Jail can’t handle them. “The state has dropped the ball for many years of not putting them in facilities that they need to be” in, he said. “And we don’t have a staff that is properly trained, or a facility that’s properly equipped for that.”
Connor said his jail works with Franklin, Kankakee and McHenry counties, which are better equipped to house people with mental illness. But the number of people in need of mental health beds far outweighs those jails’ capacities. Connor said more capacity is needed from facilities managed and run by the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), which operates state-run inpatient psychiatric hospitals.
“It would be helpful to us if we found a facility for our people that are waiting for DHS,” Connor said. “It would be helpful if DHS did their job.”
Combining Approaches Can Prevent Suicide
Christine Tartaro, a professor of criminal justice at Stockton University who authored “Suicide and Self-Harm in Prison and Jails,” said a jail’s suicide prevention policy needs to include multiple layers of deterrence. Tartaro said in an interview that jails, particularly those in smaller jurisdictions, face additional challenges.
“In terms of the small jails, it is a difficult situation in that they don’t have the resources,” Tartaro said. “And they might be in locations where it is difficult for them to hire mental health professionals who are actually willing to commute there.”
In a 2023 study in the Journal of Correctional Healthcare, Tartaro and her co-author examined corrections departments that used “peer companions” to prevent suicides. In these programs, incarcerated people who are first screened for mental-health issues are trained on suicide prevention and assist with keeping an eye on people who are at- risk for suicide. They found the approach helps everyone, including the peer companions.
“It’s helpful to the individuals who are doing it, because it gives them purpose. It gives them more of an appreciation for humanity,” Tartaro said. “And helps to change the culture in the facility.”
Tartaro and her co-author called for a comprehensive approach that includes screening at-risk individuals at several points during incarceration; ensuring information about their risk follows them throughout their time in custody; recognizing and responding to warning signs; and training staff on what suicidal behavior looks like and how to respond.
The Vera Institute of Justice, a research and policy nonprofit, studied suicide and self-harm prevention practices in county jail systems in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida and Washington. Researchers examined how the jails responded to suicides and examined barriers to sentinel event reviews, a systemic approach designed to identify failures in the jail’s systems. The study recommended that jail and public-health leadership work together to review processes for suicide and self-harm and increase transparency around findings and recommendations.
In a 2022 meta-analysis published in The Lancet, researchers analyzed 24 studies on suicide-and self-harm prevention programs in correctional facilities. Prevention programs significantly reduced suicide deaths. Programs that combined multiple prevention strategies appeared to be the most effective at reducing suicide deaths.
A Department of Justice (DOJ) working group’s 2024 report was consistent with those findings and recommended a multifaceted approach to suicide prevention in federal prisons and detention facilities. The report recommended a combination of intake screenings, staff training, consistent observation of high-risk people, providing access to mental health services, suicide safety planning and stronger support of social and family contact. It also recommended reducing the use of restrictive housing and single-cell confinement and promoting a culture of wellness and safety inside correctional settings.
In 2025, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association involving 800 people at higher risk of suicide in correctional facilities in Rhode Island and Michigan tested an approach that combined safety planning inside the jail with follow-up phone calls after people were released. Participants who received the combined intervention had fewer than half as many suicide attempts as those who only received enhanced standard care.
“Safety planning can certainly be used with individuals to help them think through ways to stay safe in jail,” said the study’s lead author, Lauren Weinstock, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. She added that safety planning isn’t useful if a suicide risk becomes imminent. “So it also speaks to the need for other practices and interventions.”
Illinois has several approaches for preventing suicide in correctional facilities, but it’s unclear how well they’re working.
State law requires county jails to train staff on suicide prevention and mental health issues. According to the law, the training should cover how to identify signs someone is at risk of suicide and refer someone who is at risk to appropriate care. Additionally, the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) inspects jails annually on how well they’re meeting state standards around a host of items, including suicide prevention.
According to an Illinois Answers review of eight years of inspection reports, Madison County Jail was noncompliant with standards that require guards to check on detained people every half hour in 2024 and 2025. The jail was compliant for six out of the seven previous years.
After Pittman’s attempt at the Madison County Jail, he was taken to a nearby hospital, then moved to another in St. Louis. Hamilton was already living in Colorado at the time and flew back as soon as she could.
Hamilton said hospice staff told her they didn’t expect Pittman to live longer than four or five years after the injury. Under her care, he survived nearly two decades.
“The only thing I can do is trust and believe in God,” Hamilton said.
This article first appeared on Illinois Answers Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.