If you’ve never spent a couple of days in county, you can hardly imagine what a billionaire was facing. ALL the privilege and leverage in the world, gone. Exactly.

People really underestimate this.

Suicide risk is dramatically higher when a person is first incarcerated. The shock caused by being in a dramatically different living situation and the knowledge that this is your new reality for the rest of your life is immense even if you come from a normal background with normal struggles.

This guy was a billionaire. To there’s nothing that he couldn’t do or have (even evil and gruesome things, as we know). He was the king of his world, he had staff, multiple houses, private islands, jets, every hedonistic pleasure and experience was available to him at any time.

He went from living that life to sleeping on a tiny steel cot with a pancake-thick mattress, in a 7’x12’ box. He doesn’t control anything there, when he eats, when he sleeps, where he goes, who he talks to are all determined by other people. He doesn’t even control his own light switch.

That’s an incredibly powerful shock in a situation where we know that the risk of suicide is increased.

The fact that people see this suicide as a conspiracy is more evidence of proportionality bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_bias) than anything else.