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I tend to be very skeptical of claims of conspiracy and conspiracy theories in general but I've yet to hear a reasonable theory to explain how Epstein could hav

by mikece 7y ago

I tend to be very skeptical of claims of conspiracy and conspiracy theories in general but I've yet to hear a reasonable theory to explain how Epstein could have killed himself in a cell and unit where suicide is made a practical impossibility. A friend in law enforcement related a story about someone on suicide watch who managed to kill himself by eating/shoving massive amount of toilet paper down his throat and then drinking water (which caused the tissue to expand and suffocate him). After that, toilet paper was issued as needed rather than having rolls available in the cells. They go to INSANE degrees to make self-slaughter impossible in these units.

sp332 7y ago
Epstein was taken off suicide watch though. Edit: the rate of suicide is still pretty darn low, and lots of other stuff worth looking in to. Just pointing out that he wasn't on suicide watch at the time.
- jacobush 7y ago
  It would seem if someone were to murder him, it would be prudent to take him off suicide watch first.
  - dannypgh 7y ago
    ...but surely it's also the case that successful suicide is more likely when someone is taken off of suicide watch, no? Citing this as evidence of malicious intent seems like a reach.
    - blotter_paper 7y ago
      He supposedly tried to kill himself 18 days prior, and he was a witness who could potentially spill the beans on a bunch of wealthy kid fucks (and whoever had blackmail against them, if Epstein wasn't the ultimate top of this pedo pyramid). Yes, not monitoring the arrested billionaire pedophile who had been fucking kids with other billionaires and political figures who control the country, right after a first "suicide" attempt is made, seems sketch as fuck. If they're not complicit in whatever happened, the TLAs would have had an obvious interest in monitoring that cell. Does the federal government not care about knowing if a foreign power has videos of a former President (and quite possibly a sitting one, though we don't have flight records) raping kids, or is the federal government incapable of monitoring a man in prison? I was expecting Epstein to die before trial, but I was still surpised by how brazen it was. This is the most obvious American deepstate murder since Michael Hastings.
      - cc81 7y ago
        So why didn't Epstein arrange so any attempt on his life would result on all the dirt on people being sent out? Why didn't Epstein tell the prosecution "Holy fuck, people are trying to kill me, I want a protection and a deal and I will tell on everyone" after the first attempt?
        blotter_paper 7y ago
        I don't know how intelligent Epstein was or how much he knew. It's possible that those CDs they took from his locked safe[0] were the only insurance policy he had: > Federal agents who searched Epstein's $77 million Upper East Side townhouse in Manhattan also found "in a locked safe ... compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: 'Young [Name] + [Name],' 'Misc nudes 1,' and 'Girl pics nudes,' " according to a new court filing in Epstein's case. I can't find anything about what was on those tapes, what names were actually written on them, if the were encrypted, or if any followup investigation is being done, but maybe my googlefu is just weak. He certainly could have hired somebody competent enough to write a dead man's switch which would release the files if he didn't run a script every X months, but only if he was intelligent and knowledgable enough to come up with that plan in the first place. He could have known that he had no undeniable evidence left in his hands. He could have taken the first attempt as a message, and thought that keeping his head low and shutting up was his best chance at avoiding further trouble. He could have understood his time was limited while also still supporting the greater mission of the blackmail plot and not being willing to blow the cover on his handlers. These are all speculations, I don't know exactly how the events played out. I'd even give the body-double crowd a ~5% chance of being right (but that's a crit fail on a d20; 5% isn't much). I do feel comfortable saying that Epstein almost certainly photographed a former President raping a child, which screams "state actor blackmail," and it seems highly unlikely to me that such a man wasn't being watched by the TLAs unless they were purposefully turning a blind eye. [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/07/08/jeffrey-epstein-called-sexual-predator-as-prosecutors-seek-no-bail.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/07/08/jeffrey-epstein-called-s...
- ddingus 7y ago
  Should he have been?
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    That's not the issue with regards to the parent comment. The parent said he couldn't believe someone could kill themselves in a bare cell meant to stop people from suicide, but that's not where he was.
    - ddingus 7y ago
      Exactly, thus my question.
      - BubRoss 7y ago
        What do you mean 'thus your question'? That's the first question everyone has, why would you ask it in an irrelevant chain of replies to someone who wasn't commenting on it in the first place?
        ddingus 7y ago
        I don't know that's the 1st question everyone has. I do know this meta discussion is unlikely to be worth it, and I am quite happy to move on.
- DanBC 7y ago
  > the rate of suicide is still pretty darn low, What is being counted, and how is it being counted? For example, what has to happen for it to be counted as a death by suicide in that prison? Is it enough for the self injurious act have to occur in the prison, or does the person have to die in the prison?
partiallypro 7y ago
He was taken off of suicide watch, so he had all the materials he needed to kill himself. Also...every person I've read with working knowledge of that prison has stressed the gross negligence and incompetence there.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago
  This was the same prison that somehow held El Chapo, a serial jailbreaker, in custody throughout his trial. They can be competent when actually motivated to do so.
  - RobAtticus 7y ago
    El Chapo broke out of Mexican prisons where his ability to influence guards/staff is much greater than a US prison. Also, being able to prevent someone from breaking out and preventing someone from killing themselves seem like two different classes of problems. Being good enough to prevent one doesn't necessarily imply being good enough to prevent the other.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    fun fact, one of el chapo's attornies signed epstein's trust creation certificate in the days before epstein died.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  he had all the materials he needed to kill himself He is alleged to have hung himself with materials no stronger than tissue paper.
  - partiallypro 7y ago
    Says who? He was hung with a bed sheet.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      Plenty of sources for this e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/08/10/former-mcc-inmate-theres-no-way-jeffrey-epstein-killed-himself/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/08/10/former-mc... There’s no way that man could have killed himself. I’ve done too much time in those units. It’s an impossibility. Between the floor and the ceiling is like 8 or 9 feet. There’s no way for you to connect to anything. You have sheets, but they’re paper level, not strong enough. He was 200 pounds — it would never happen.
mc32 7y ago
Yeah I’m also skeptical of improbable theories... but this one looks, I mean looks, too convenient. Cameras go offline, taken off suicide watch... even if it wasn’t someone physically doing him in, they can drive him to do it by psychological means. This was one of the highest profile cases in the last decade. That they didn’t have him watched 24x7 is incredible gross negligence or more. I mean you have low level criminals get more attention when they signal possible self harm than this guy. PS toilet paper: can’t they get prison safe bidets?
- trickstra 7y ago
  That's because you never hear about the cameras that go offline when nothing interesting happened. It's probably very common.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Yes of course, but normally security would get pinged with alarms especially if the cameras were tagged as critical. In secure environs when they get a camera offline condition they send out people to do the watching.
    - pc86 7y ago
      This is going to sound argumentative and I don't mean it that way. > normally security would get pinged with alarms especially if the cameras were tagged as critical Unless you've worked on prison infrastructure before I'm not sure how you could know this with any level of confidence.
    - TheOperator 7y ago
      >if Honestly an IT team would MAYBE bother to prioritize these cameras as critical. They only definitely would after something like this happened. It's an easy thing to put on the backburner...
- magduf 7y ago
  >PS toilet paper: can’t they get prison safe bidets? This is America: we absolutely refuse to use bidets, no matter how much sense they make.
arbitrage 7y ago
The criminal justice / mental health field being what it is, I do not find it surprising in the least that a reviled kiddie-fucker would be allowed, by several levels of people involved, 15 minutes alone, along with plausibly accidental access to a means to kill themselves. The breaking of the hyoid bone is, in fact, not uncommon in hangings. Nor is the breaking of the cartilage. Nor is hemorrhaging in the face or eyes. Nor is blatant disregard for the fate of a paedophile, who in nobody's right mind could conceivably be innocent.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  >The breaking of the hyoid bone is, in fact, not uncommon in hangings. Nor is the breaking of the cartilage. Nor is hemorrhaging in the face or eyes. You're directly contradicting an expect here. Have any sources to back that up?
  - camel_Snake 7y ago
    Not the parent but here's the first google result: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20973326 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20973326 TLDR happens ~25% of the time for males.
    - hnuser77 7y ago
      That may be 25% of all hangings, but I imagine the rate would be lower for hangings occurred by a 6ft tall person off a 6ft tall bed post.
      - mcbuilder 7y ago
        Yeah, I would be surprised if Epstein had any sort of drop if it was suicide. It's not like he had the means to tie a rope to a fan and kicked the bucket. If he did do it, it would be very ad hoc.
  - arbitrage 7y ago
    And you're blithely accepting the word of an expert who was paid to investigate the official autopsy, on behalf of Epstein's brother? Have any sources, etc.?
542458 7y ago
> killed himself in a cell and unit where suicide is made a practical impossibility Ken White (famous-ish lawyer and notable internet personality) puts it this way: "But your assessment of plausibility is based on your assumptions about how the system works. Those assumptions are, mostly, wrong — naive Dick-Wolf-level law-enforcement-are-competent-good-guys stuff". Prisons, particularly american prisons, are full of incompetence and casual disregard to human life and dignity. The prison where Epstein died was understaffed, and the guards tasked with watching him had next-to-no training. Epstein had also been taken off suicide watch nine days earlier. Ken White put together 32 other cases where people died, or almost died in jail because the administration was too incompetent or too indifferent to do anything: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two...
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  > The prison where Epstein died was understaffed, and the guards tasked with watching him had no training on suicide watches. This could have been intentional, fyi.
  - nkrisc 7y ago
    I would wager that those same conditions were true long before Epstein ever set foot in there as well.
    - snagglegaggle 7y ago
      Apparently as Epstein arrived or shortly before his death the guards were rotated and two with very little suicide watch experience were present. One was also caught sleeping?
      - ssully 7y ago
        Is a guard sleeping on duty during a night shift surprising to you? As 542458 said, the level of competency that people assume is hilarious. Prison staff are overworked, underpaid, and have miserable jobs.
DanBC 7y ago
People kill themselves when under observation all the time. The people observing are negligent, the systems don't work, people think 5 minute of 15 minute obs are sufficient. It's not in any way uncommon. Statistical methodology hides the true numbers. People talk about "suicide" when they should be asking about "suspected self inflicted death".
- nkurz 7y ago
  > It's not in any way uncommon. Could you put numbers on that? From what I can tell, in the facility where Epstein died, there have been many thousands of people held, and only one recorded suicide in the last 40 years. Do you disagree with this claim, and think there were many more suicides that were not recorded as such? Or do you consider this rate to be "not in any way uncommon"? I could agree with "not impossible", but not with "not uncommon".
  - DanBC 7y ago
    > and only one recorded suicide in the last 40 years. > Do you disagree with this claim Yes. It's clearly nonsense to suggest that no-one has caused their own death while in that prison, so we need to ask what is being counted and how it's being counted. Suicide accounts for at least one quarter of unnatural death in jails. Suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails. Deaths by suicide are consistently higher in jails than in the general population. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/mlj07.txt https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/mlj07.txt Are they talking about NVDRS, or about state reports, or about institution reports? What ICD10 codes are they using? Are they only including deaths where the person died in the prison and that are ruled by coroners to be suicide? Because these two things alone will remove most deaths from the stats. Or are they including all deaths where the lethal action was completed in the jail, even if the person died later in hospital? Many people will die in hospital, not the prison. A suicide verdict will require a coroner / medical examiner to be convinced to whatever burden of proof they're using (beyond all reasonable doubt? Preponderance of evidence? balance of probabilities?) that the death was both self-inflicted and that the dead person had the intent to end their life. These are high thresholds, which is why statistical organisations (ONS in UK, CDC in US) don't count death by suicide by only counting verdicts of suicide from coroners. The vast majority of people talking about this death do not know what type of coronial / medical examiner system is used for deaths that occur in that prison. They don't know what burdens of proof are used. They don't know what a coroner / medical examiner needs to know to find a verdict of suicide. They don't know about the high rates of deaths by suicide among prisoners. They don't know that while, male, middle-aged, sex-offending, inmates are at highest risk of death by suicide. They don't know about the high rates of negligence among prison guards tasked with monitoring people at risk of suicide. And yet, even though they're ignorant of all this, they feel free to make wild speculation that he was murdered.
kpU8efre7r 7y ago
Easy. He wasn't on suicide watch when he did it.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why a high profile figure wouldn't have a camera pointed at them 24/7. And a second camera for backup.
- zbyte64 7y ago
  Cost, specifically: $200 camera < Implicated billionaires
zbyte64 7y ago
Crazy to think that our justice system is so dysfunctional we can hardly distinguish between malice and incompetence. Conspiracies aside, such dysfunction provide opportunities to those who oversee to just "let it happen".
lazyasciiart 7y ago
In 2018, Britain refused to extradite a guy to the US because he would have been held in either this prison or it's Brooklyn equivalent (the one where prisoners were left without heat or electricity in the storm this year), and they said it was too likely that he would commit suicide given the terrible conditions and lack of care (https://gothamist.com/news/prisoners-endure-a-nightmare-gulag-in-lower-manhattan-hidden-in-plain-sight https://gothamist.com/news/prisoners-endure-a-nightmare-gula...). Guards at this prison have been (recently!) convicted of raping or beating inmates. A few years ago a guy was beaten to death and the jail said he'd overdosed - the footage of that has never been seen either, the family is still suing the jail. Everyone who cared knew that this prison was a hellhole with poor oversight and poor control, long before Eptstein came near it. Nobody in American politics gives a shit that people facing federal charges are (according to the UN) routinely tortured by being held here. The DoJ is "investigating" conditions at these prisons, but since they are also running them, nobody expects much. (https://theintercept.com/2019/02/09/mdc-brooklyn-justice-department-investigation/ https://theintercept.com/2019/02/09/mdc-brooklyn-justice-dep...) The sheer ignorance that drives most of the reaction to Epstein's death is awful. Maybe a little of this righteous outrage could get spent on actually making these prisons the well-run, safe facilities people think they are, but I doubt it will be.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago
  What is "ignorant" is pointing to the prison conditions of the poor and relatively unknown mass of prisoners and then asserting that we should have expected the same thing for Jeffrey Epstein. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars (allegedly, at least), and when people of that level of wealth are imprisoned at all, it is at some Club Fed facility where they're relatively comfortable and well protected. In fact, we already have an example of how people like Jeffrey Epstein are usually treated in federal prison, because he himself served a stint in one after his 2008 plea deal, and it was nothing like the parade of horrors we are now constantly told is just par for the course for prisoners like him.
  - lazyasciiart 7y ago
    You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. For a start, this facility only holds people who have not yet had a trial. "Normally", wealthy people like him are not held in detention at all while waiting for their trial - like Martha Stewart.
admax88q 7y ago
The takeaway from that story for me is that people will go insane lengths to commit suicide, though means nobody would have even thought of, and law enforcement just removes each mechanism as it's discovered.
friendlybus 7y ago
Are we supposed to believe they didn't kill him? They took off suicide watch. The authorities are responsible for his well being. As others have said they go to insane degrees to prevent suicide. It's either death through negligence or active killing. If you take his moment of physical death out of the equation, the story around his legal protection and then lack of it was enough to kill him. I don't think there's much of a story in the end of the Epstein case. The only people that know aren't going to say anything until it's a footnote in the history books. The conservatives peso hunt comes to a close and metoo had Weinstein. Who knows what crimes they committed against the powers that be, if any. I don't know.

by mikece 7y ago

sp332 7y ago

Epstein was taken off suicide watch though. Edit: the rate of suicide is still pretty darn low, and lots of other stuff worth looking in to. Just pointing out that he wasn't on suicide watch at the time.

jacobush 7y ago
It would seem if someone were to murder him, it would be prudent to take him off suicide watch first.
- dannypgh 7y ago
  ...but surely it's also the case that successful suicide is more likely when someone is taken off of suicide watch, no? Citing this as evidence of malicious intent seems like a reach.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    He supposedly tried to kill himself 18 days prior, and he was a witness who could potentially spill the beans on a bunch of wealthy kid fucks (and whoever had blackmail against them, if Epstein wasn't the ultimate top of this pedo pyramid). Yes, not monitoring the arrested billionaire pedophile who had been fucking kids with other billionaires and political figures who control the country, right after a first "suicide" attempt is made, seems sketch as fuck. If they're not complicit in whatever happened, the TLAs would have had an obvious interest in monitoring that cell. Does the federal government not care about knowing if a foreign power has videos of a former President (and quite possibly a sitting one, though we don't have flight records) raping kids, or is the federal government incapable of monitoring a man in prison? I was expecting Epstein to die before trial, but I was still surpised by how brazen it was. This is the most obvious American deepstate murder since Michael Hastings.
    - cc81 7y ago
      So why didn't Epstein arrange so any attempt on his life would result on all the dirt on people being sent out? Why didn't Epstein tell the prosecution "Holy fuck, people are trying to kill me, I want a protection and a deal and I will tell on everyone" after the first attempt?
      - blotter_paper 7y ago
        I don't know how intelligent Epstein was or how much he knew. It's possible that those CDs they took from his locked safe[0] were the only insurance policy he had: > Federal agents who searched Epstein's $77 million Upper East Side townhouse in Manhattan also found "in a locked safe ... compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: 'Young [Name] + [Name],' 'Misc nudes 1,' and 'Girl pics nudes,' " according to a new court filing in Epstein's case. I can't find anything about what was on those tapes, what names were actually written on them, if the were encrypted, or if any followup investigation is being done, but maybe my googlefu is just weak. He certainly could have hired somebody competent enough to write a dead man's switch which would release the files if he didn't run a script every X months, but only if he was intelligent and knowledgable enough to come up with that plan in the first place. He could have known that he had no undeniable evidence left in his hands. He could have taken the first attempt as a message, and thought that keeping his head low and shutting up was his best chance at avoiding further trouble. He could have understood his time was limited while also still supporting the greater mission of the blackmail plot and not being willing to blow the cover on his handlers. These are all speculations, I don't know exactly how the events played out. I'd even give the body-double crowd a ~5% chance of being right (but that's a crit fail on a d20; 5% isn't much). I do feel comfortable saying that Epstein almost certainly photographed a former President raping a child, which screams "state actor blackmail," and it seems highly unlikely to me that such a man wasn't being watched by the TLAs unless they were purposefully turning a blind eye. [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/07/08/jeffrey-epstein-called-sexual-predator-as-prosecutors-seek-no-bail.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/07/08/jeffrey-epstein-called-s...
ddingus 7y ago
Should he have been?
- BubRoss 7y ago
  That's not the issue with regards to the parent comment. The parent said he couldn't believe someone could kill themselves in a bare cell meant to stop people from suicide, but that's not where he was.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Exactly, thus my question.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      What do you mean 'thus your question'? That's the first question everyone has, why would you ask it in an irrelevant chain of replies to someone who wasn't commenting on it in the first place?
      - ddingus 7y ago
        I don't know that's the 1st question everyone has. I do know this meta discussion is unlikely to be worth it, and I am quite happy to move on.
DanBC 7y ago
> the rate of suicide is still pretty darn low, What is being counted, and how is it being counted? For example, what has to happen for it to be counted as a death by suicide in that prison? Is it enough for the self injurious act have to occur in the prison, or does the person have to die in the prison?

partiallypro 7y ago

He was taken off of suicide watch, so he had all the materials he needed to kill himself. Also...every person I've read with working knowledge of that prison has stressed the gross negligence and incompetence there.

AndrewBissell 7y ago
This was the same prison that somehow held El Chapo, a serial jailbreaker, in custody throughout his trial. They can be competent when actually motivated to do so.
- RobAtticus 7y ago
  El Chapo broke out of Mexican prisons where his ability to influence guards/staff is much greater than a US prison. Also, being able to prevent someone from breaking out and preventing someone from killing themselves seem like two different classes of problems. Being good enough to prevent one doesn't necessarily imply being good enough to prevent the other.
- weaksauce 7y ago
  fun fact, one of el chapo's attornies signed epstein's trust creation certificate in the days before epstein died.
goatinaboat 7y ago
he had all the materials he needed to kill himself He is alleged to have hung himself with materials no stronger than tissue paper.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  Says who? He was hung with a bed sheet.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Plenty of sources for this e.g. https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/08/10/former-mcc-inmate-theres-no-way-jeffrey-epstein-killed-himself/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2019/08/10/former-mc... There’s no way that man could have killed himself. I’ve done too much time in those units. It’s an impossibility. Between the floor and the ceiling is like 8 or 9 feet. There’s no way for you to connect to anything. You have sheets, but they’re paper level, not strong enough. He was 200 pounds — it would never happen.

mc32 7y ago

Yeah I’m also skeptical of improbable theories... but this one looks, I mean looks, too convenient. Cameras go offline, taken off suicide watch... even if it wasn’t someone physically doing him in, they can drive him to do it by psychological means. This was one of the highest profile cases in the last decade. That they didn’t have him watched 24x7 is incredible gross negligence or more. I mean you have low level criminals get more attention when they signal possible self harm than this guy. PS toilet paper: can’t they get prison safe bidets?

trickstra 7y ago
That's because you never hear about the cameras that go offline when nothing interesting happened. It's probably very common.
- mc32 7y ago
  Yes of course, but normally security would get pinged with alarms especially if the cameras were tagged as critical. In secure environs when they get a camera offline condition they send out people to do the watching.
  - pc86 7y ago
    This is going to sound argumentative and I don't mean it that way. > normally security would get pinged with alarms especially if the cameras were tagged as critical Unless you've worked on prison infrastructure before I'm not sure how you could know this with any level of confidence.
  - TheOperator 7y ago
    >if Honestly an IT team would MAYBE bother to prioritize these cameras as critical. They only definitely would after something like this happened. It's an easy thing to put on the backburner...
magduf 7y ago
>PS toilet paper: can’t they get prison safe bidets? This is America: we absolutely refuse to use bidets, no matter how much sense they make.

arbitrage 7y ago

The criminal justice / mental health field being what it is, I do not find it surprising in the least that a reviled kiddie-fucker would be allowed, by several levels of people involved, 15 minutes alone, along with plausibly accidental access to a means to kill themselves. The breaking of the hyoid bone is, in fact, not uncommon in hangings. Nor is the breaking of the cartilage. Nor is hemorrhaging in the face or eyes. Nor is blatant disregard for the fate of a paedophile, who in nobody's right mind could conceivably be innocent.

EpicEng 7y ago
>The breaking of the hyoid bone is, in fact, not uncommon in hangings. Nor is the breaking of the cartilage. Nor is hemorrhaging in the face or eyes. You're directly contradicting an expect here. Have any sources to back that up?
- camel_Snake 7y ago
  Not the parent but here's the first google result: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20973326 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20973326 TLDR happens ~25% of the time for males.
  - hnuser77 7y ago
    That may be 25% of all hangings, but I imagine the rate would be lower for hangings occurred by a 6ft tall person off a 6ft tall bed post.
    - mcbuilder 7y ago
      Yeah, I would be surprised if Epstein had any sort of drop if it was suicide. It's not like he had the means to tie a rope to a fan and kicked the bucket. If he did do it, it would be very ad hoc.
- arbitrage 7y ago
  And you're blithely accepting the word of an expert who was paid to investigate the official autopsy, on behalf of Epstein's brother? Have any sources, etc.?

542458 7y ago

> killed himself in a cell and unit where suicide is made a practical impossibility Ken White (famous-ish lawyer and notable internet personality) puts it this way: "But your assessment of plausibility is based on your assumptions about how the system works. Those assumptions are, mostly, wrong — naive Dick-Wolf-level law-enforcement-are-competent-good-guys stuff". Prisons, particularly american prisons, are full of incompetence and casual disregard to human life and dignity. The prison where Epstein died was understaffed, and the guards tasked with watching him had next-to-no training. Epstein had also been taken off suicide watch nine days earlier. Ken White put together 32 other cases where people died, or almost died in jail because the administration was too incompetent or too indifferent to do anything: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two...

snagglegaggle 7y ago
> The prison where Epstein died was understaffed, and the guards tasked with watching him had no training on suicide watches. This could have been intentional, fyi.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  I would wager that those same conditions were true long before Epstein ever set foot in there as well.
  - snagglegaggle 7y ago
    Apparently as Epstein arrived or shortly before his death the guards were rotated and two with very little suicide watch experience were present. One was also caught sleeping?
    - ssully 7y ago
      Is a guard sleeping on duty during a night shift surprising to you? As 542458 said, the level of competency that people assume is hilarious. Prison staff are overworked, underpaid, and have miserable jobs.

DanBC 7y ago

People kill themselves when under observation all the time. The people observing are negligent, the systems don't work, people think 5 minute of 15 minute obs are sufficient. It's not in any way uncommon. Statistical methodology hides the true numbers. People talk about "suicide" when they should be asking about "suspected self inflicted death".

nkurz 7y ago
> It's not in any way uncommon. Could you put numbers on that? From what I can tell, in the facility where Epstein died, there have been many thousands of people held, and only one recorded suicide in the last 40 years. Do you disagree with this claim, and think there were many more suicides that were not recorded as such? Or do you consider this rate to be "not in any way uncommon"? I could agree with "not impossible", but not with "not uncommon".
- DanBC 7y ago
  > and only one recorded suicide in the last 40 years. > Do you disagree with this claim Yes. It's clearly nonsense to suggest that no-one has caused their own death while in that prison, so we need to ask what is being counted and how it's being counted. Suicide accounts for at least one quarter of unnatural death in jails. Suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails. Deaths by suicide are consistently higher in jails than in the general population. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/mlj07.txt https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/mlj07.txt Are they talking about NVDRS, or about state reports, or about institution reports? What ICD10 codes are they using? Are they only including deaths where the person died in the prison and that are ruled by coroners to be suicide? Because these two things alone will remove most deaths from the stats. Or are they including all deaths where the lethal action was completed in the jail, even if the person died later in hospital? Many people will die in hospital, not the prison. A suicide verdict will require a coroner / medical examiner to be convinced to whatever burden of proof they're using (beyond all reasonable doubt? Preponderance of evidence? balance of probabilities?) that the death was both self-inflicted and that the dead person had the intent to end their life. These are high thresholds, which is why statistical organisations (ONS in UK, CDC in US) don't count death by suicide by only counting verdicts of suicide from coroners. The vast majority of people talking about this death do not know what type of coronial / medical examiner system is used for deaths that occur in that prison. They don't know what burdens of proof are used. They don't know what a coroner / medical examiner needs to know to find a verdict of suicide. They don't know about the high rates of deaths by suicide among prisoners. They don't know that while, male, middle-aged, sex-offending, inmates are at highest risk of death by suicide. They don't know about the high rates of negligence among prison guards tasked with monitoring people at risk of suicide. And yet, even though they're ignorant of all this, they feel free to make wild speculation that he was murdered.

kpU8efre7r 7y ago

Easy. He wasn't on suicide watch when he did it.

lotsofpulp 7y ago

I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why a high profile figure wouldn't have a camera pointed at them 24/7. And a second camera for backup.

zbyte64 7y ago
Cost, specifically: $200 camera < Implicated billionaires

zbyte64 7y ago

Crazy to think that our justice system is so dysfunctional we can hardly distinguish between malice and incompetence. Conspiracies aside, such dysfunction provide opportunities to those who oversee to just "let it happen".

lazyasciiart 7y ago

In 2018, Britain refused to extradite a guy to the US because he would have been held in either this prison or it's Brooklyn equivalent (the one where prisoners were left without heat or electricity in the storm this year), and they said it was too likely that he would commit suicide given the terrible conditions and lack of care (https://gothamist.com/news/prisoners-endure-a-nightmare-gulag-in-lower-manhattan-hidden-in-plain-sight https://gothamist.com/news/prisoners-endure-a-nightmare-gula...). Guards at this prison have been (recently!) convicted of raping or beating inmates. A few years ago a guy was beaten to death and the jail said he'd overdosed - the footage of that has never been seen either, the family is still suing the jail. Everyone who cared knew that this prison was a hellhole with poor oversight and poor control, long before Eptstein came near it. Nobody in American politics gives a shit that people facing federal charges are (according to the UN) routinely tortured by being held here. The DoJ is "investigating" conditions at these prisons, but since they are also running them, nobody expects much. (https://theintercept.com/2019/02/09/mdc-brooklyn-justice-department-investigation/ https://theintercept.com/2019/02/09/mdc-brooklyn-justice-dep...) The sheer ignorance that drives most of the reaction to Epstein's death is awful. Maybe a little of this righteous outrage could get spent on actually making these prisons the well-run, safe facilities people think they are, but I doubt it will be.

AndrewBissell 7y ago
What is "ignorant" is pointing to the prison conditions of the poor and relatively unknown mass of prisoners and then asserting that we should have expected the same thing for Jeffrey Epstein. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars (allegedly, at least), and when people of that level of wealth are imprisoned at all, it is at some Club Fed facility where they're relatively comfortable and well protected. In fact, we already have an example of how people like Jeffrey Epstein are usually treated in federal prison, because he himself served a stint in one after his 2008 plea deal, and it was nothing like the parade of horrors we are now constantly told is just par for the course for prisoners like him.
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. For a start, this facility only holds people who have not yet had a trial. "Normally", wealthy people like him are not held in detention at all while waiting for their trial - like Martha Stewart.

admax88q 7y ago

The takeaway from that story for me is that people will go insane lengths to commit suicide, though means nobody would have even thought of, and law enforcement just removes each mechanism as it's discovered.

friendlybus 7y ago

Are we supposed to believe they didn't kill him? They took off suicide watch. The authorities are responsible for his well being. As others have said they go to insane degrees to prevent suicide. It's either death through negligence or active killing. If you take his moment of physical death out of the equation, the story around his legal protection and then lack of it was enough to kill him. I don't think there's much of a story in the end of the Epstein case. The only people that know aren't going to say anything until it's a footnote in the history books. The conservatives peso hunt comes to a close and metoo had Weinstein. Who knows what crimes they committed against the powers that be, if any. I don't know.