Canadian federal institutions detain only those offenders who have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment of two years or more. They do not contain prisoners on remand. The population examined in this study thus consisted entirely of sentenced prisoners serving two years or more. The records of inmates who committed suicide between 1977 and 1988 were obtained from the records department of the Correctional Service of Canada. Demographic Characteristics of Inmates Consistent with previous major research, inmate suicide was found to be more common among men.
Earlier research shows diverse results in the age distribution of inmates who committed suicide.
In contrast, our study found the age of inmates who committed suicide to be evenly distributed with no remarkable peaks. One explanation for the higher suicide rate among single prisoners is Durkheim's thesis of egoistic suicide which postulates that individuals with fewer communal ties are more likely to commit suicide. The numbers of suicides occurring in each of the five different regions of the Correctional Service of Canada varied considerably. The following figure compares these results to the number and corresponding percentage of inmates housed in each region. We can see that as a percentage of total suicides, the Atlantic region and particularly Quebec are higher than the corresponding percentage of the total population housed in those regions.