Content warning: discussion of suicide.

If you are thinking about suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255).

Recommended Citation: Richard Rivera, Traumatized to Death: The Cumulative Effects of Serial Parole Denials, 23 CUNY L. Rev. F. 25 (2020)

Authored By: Richard Rivera

INTRODUCTION

On August 3, 2016, after forty years of continuous incarceration, seventy-year-old John MacKenzie was locked in his cell for the night and killed himself.^[1] He was not discovered until the next morning. A month earlier, John had made his tenth and final appearance before the New York State Board of Parole and was denied release to parole for the tenth consecutive time.^[2] Rumors about why John decided to end his life abound among prisoners, especially among those who knew him. “He was killed by the CO’s,” many claimed, subscribing to ready-made narratives about correction officers fed, in large part, by their own fears and apprehensions about all things prison. “He made a pact with himself not to do a day over forty years,” the long-termers[3] asserted,[4] zeroing in on the existential crisis that might drive a man like John to suicide. Whatever speculations surround John’s death, his repeated encounters with the Board of Parole certainly factored into his decision to end it. In a final letter to his daughter, John put it this way: “They’re hell-bent on keeping me in prison,” and “I don’t believe I’ll last much longer.”^[5]