> 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
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.