The state of New York and its employees expend impressive resources trying to keep these children alive. I do not mean this in that we feed and clothe them, that we try to give them academic and job skills for when they return to their communities, that we guide them away from substance abuse and explosive anger so that they will not run afoul of a bad day. We do all of these things on a daily basis, as a matter of course, but this is not enough.

I literally meant that we keep these children alive. They are already emotionally dysregulated or they would not be sentenced to being my student. Removed by the courts from their shaky support systems, on their third year of a six-month sentence, realizing how few escape the cycle of incarceration, they attempt suicide. Unlike suicidal gestures outside juvenile detention, they have to get creative in their despair. They have no access to sharp objects with which to open a vein or drugs on which they could overdose. No doorknob or fixture here allows a cord wrapped around it. Even if they could, my students have no access to ligatures, so much so that they only have Velcro shoes. None of our cleaning chemicals is likely to give more than a stomach ache if ingested, which also means that they don't clean well. When they want to try to end their lives, they find themselves bereft of most options more effective than holding their breath.

This does not mean they do not surprise us with their fatal resourcefulness. They cannot find the hypotenuse or the location of a subjunctive clause. They wouldn't know a mouse from a marsupial. They couldn't tell you if Obama was a Republican or Democrat, but they turn geniuses when it comes to ending their lives.

When a boy so much as implies he is thinking about considering suicide, we put him on suicide watch. Any staff member can initiate this, but it is mostly the YDAs and clinical who do. This watch means that a YDA is always within an arm's length. Yes, this does include when the subject of the watch is sitting on the toilet and when they are sleeping, though there are no cameras in the residents' rooms and the YDA must always be visible, leading to them sitting with chair legs exactly on the threshold of the door. The residents' rooms are stripped of anything that is nonessential, anything that might contribute to or disguise an attempt. This is not a punitive gesture. We keep them alive no matter what, even it if means being two feet away from a boy with the stomach flu.

If they came in here intent to die on our watch, it would not be difficult to succeed. All the boy would have to do is be placid and agreeable for three days after intake, then find some lethal means and quickly end his life in a bathroom while afforded a few minutes of privacy. The frequent pat searches would keep him from smuggling anything from the grounds or the education wing, but the dedicated boy could find means on their living unit. He would only get one chance, after which he would always be suspect.

This does not happen because our boys telegraph every punch. The depressed and suicidal here are not good enough actors. In their emotional response, we get some of the only truth they can offer. Teenage boys, as a rule, are not subtle creatures.

In our frequent suicide trainings, we hear rumors of facilities that failed their charges, boys who managed somehow to hang themselves, ones who swallowed foreign objects it wouldn't occur to you could fit halfway down a windpipe, a boy who drown himself in a pond on the property and wasn't found until first thaw. I don't know that these are completely true, but I understand they are meant to warn us away from complacency, from brushing off a suicidal remark because we think the boy is likely trying to be manipulative. We as a facility cannot have a boy's death on our hands. The scandal of it might be enough, it is whispered, to shut up down and destroy careers, if not a stain on our souls. The price of their survival is our eternal vigilance.

When one of our boys has made an attempt, he is transferred to a psychiatric hospital. The residents invariably think they have gamed the system, until they notice the YDAs still have them under constant supervision. The hospital clears them and they return to fulfill their sentences. Justice, as the state sees it, cannot be foiled by something so petty as a move toward self-destruction. We cannot release them for trying to kill themselves. Think of the precedent that would set. We would have facilities full of boys who would take the gamble of slitting their wrists with pencils for the chance at a reduced sentence. Or we could have boys who realize a weak attempt here would give them the opportunity of a sincere attempt on the outside. It is an impossible situation and, for all the money we devote to psychologists and clinicians, we are not a psychiatric hospital. We can give them prescribed mood stabilizers, but we cannot give the profoundly mentally ill the palliative care they need.

We've had boys who looped shoelaces around their neck, back when they could have laces. We've had those who tried to make nooses of yarn meant for lanyards, a summer camp sort of suicide attempt. I have witnessed the new, regular scratches on boys' arms they swear they got from our chicken coop.

There are only three reasons the YDAs can restraint a resident: if they are trying to escape, if they are a danger to others, if they are a danger to themselves. That last one tends to give the YDAs a second too long of hesitation, since they do not understand suicide as a concept. If a boy punches another boy, the protocol is clear. If he bites into his arm hard enough to draw blood, it seems more a spectacle than threat.

These are not emotionally photogenic examples of suicidal teens – the blonde girl blasting her music too loudly to mask her sobbing; the slight, gay boy scribbling down a suicide note in his spiral bound notebook before he takes his mother’s Valium; the passionate artist who can’t feel understood in his Podunk town in the Midwest – but that makes them no less worthy of saving. That some of them have committed sex crimes, mugged dozens, or brutalized innocent people makes their lives no less worthy, though these will be the reasons even bleeding heart liberals will whisper behind their hands that maybe we ought to let nature run its course this time and devote the resources to someone a little more sympathetic. Professionally and personally, we cannot afford to do less that our best to keep them from self-destruction.

I have long worried that my students will die because the odds are against them compared against the average teen. They are violent, have short fuses, and a host of addictions to self-medicate and try to fit in with more functional users. I do not picture their deaths to be self-inflicted, though this is far more likely a bet. Their decisions are stupid, but they are not themselves stupid. Outside our constant care, they may realize that no one in their lives will stop them, will even notice. Before them is a truly unfair amount of work that would put them at the place where middle-class, neurotypical, white children without abusive parents start. Seeing the road ahead, they may give up, having never internalized that they can be anything more. Their suicides may not be recognized as such. Better to go out in a blaze of bravado, getting fellow gang members or police to do the deed. Or they will drug themselves into an oblivion from which they cannot wake. "Suicide" will not be listed as the cause of death, but it will be the truth. In forfeiting their lives, they may arrest any mourners who might have wept t their gravesites, if they have graves.

They best we can promise is that we will do everything we can to forestall their suicides long enough to give them hope that an early death won't be necessary.

Soon in Xenology: Adventures. Trash picking.

last watched: Garfunkel and Oates: Trying to Be Special
reading: Norse Mythology
listening: Temple of the Dog

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