Nonetheless the analyses presented here have

Nonetheless, the analyses presented here have two serious limitations. First, we provide no insight into why the imprisonment–mortality association is different for Hispanic females than for other groups (although we do hypothesize briefly above). Second, and as has long been documented in critiques of this broader area (Wildeman, 2011), the associations presented here are not causal. In order to overcome these limitations, we provide two suggestions for future research. First, consistent with previous critiques of this area (Wildeman, 2011), we suggest providing stronger causal tests of the relationship between imprisonment, release, and mortality. Such tests could rely on exogenous shocks in imprisonment, as has some research on the consequences of imprisonment for other outcomes (Kling, 2006; Loeffler, 2013), or other methods that use quasi-experimental research designs to estimate effects, as has some research on the health consequences of imprisonment (Schnittker & John, 2007; Massoglia, 2008). Second, future research on the imprisonment–mortality relationship must test the mechanisms leading to a distinctive imprisonment–mortality relationship for Hispanic females, especially since the relationship for Hispanic males does not differ from the relationship for other males.
Acknowledgments This work was funded by a Bureau of Justice Statistics Visiting Fellowship for Christopher Wildeman, which was awarded by the Department of Justice through the Office of Justice Programs (#2012-R2-CX-K024).
Introduction The relationship between suicidal behavior and the economic ras pathway is a major question of debate among social scientists. While it is clear that suicide is influenced by medical, psychological and cultural factors, economic aspects may also play a role. Moreover, if they do, their precise connection is complex. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines suicide as “an act deliberately initiated and performed by a person in the full knowledge or expectation of its fatal outcome”. Already in 2009, the WHO forewarned its concern regarding the potential impacts of the crisis on global suicide rates (WHO, 2009a, 2009b). In its first report exclusively dedicated to the theme (WHO, 2014), the organization assures that “every 40s a person dies by suicide somewhere in the world” and that “for each adult who died of suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting”. Several researchers estimate that the Great Recession is associated with “at least 10.000 additional economic suicides between 2008 and 2010” in North America and Europe (Chang, Stuckler, Yip, & Gunnel, 2013; Stuckler, Reeves, & McKee, 2014). The widespread concern that periods of economic downturn adversely affect health outcomes was however challenged by a series of influential papers by Ruhm (2000, 2003, 2005), Neumayer (2004) and Tapia-Granados (2005, 2008), who concluded that recessions tend to lower mortality rates. Fig. 1 covers the evolution of suicide rates and GDP growth rates in Portugal for more than one century long. In 2011, after more than a decade of anemic economic growth, as suggested by Fig. 1, and during a broader European sovereign debt crisis, Portugal requested a three-year €78 billion EU-IMF bailout package with the promise to implement several unpopular austerity measures and structural reforms. During this period suicides picked again but more moderately than before. Although, traditionally, Portugal is one of the countries with the lowest suicide rate in Europe (Gusmão and Quintão, 2012), according to Fountoulakis et al. (2014, p. 3) it is the only “country that did not witness a clear reduction in the suicide rate during 2000–2011”. In a nutshell, the focus on Portugal is especially interesting because most studies in the field that cover such a long period have been performed only for very-high income countries (Morrell et al., 2002; Weyerer and Wiedenmann, 1995; Yang & Lester, 1990).