Mahogany Praylor said goodbye to her youngest brother in April, expecting to see him soon: He was going to prison, but only for a few months.

Kevin Praylor, 43, had long struggled with mental illness, and he’d gotten in trouble because he didn’t tell his parole officer he had moved in with his sister, where he felt safest during his bouts of paranoia.

But in mid-July, Kevin Praylor’s family got a call from the unit chaplain, informing them he had killed himself.

“He always said he was scared to die,” Mahogany Praylor said. “I never worried about him hurting himself.”

Her brother’s death was one of five suicides in Texas prisons in less than one week. It’s an unusual cluster of fatal self-harm behind bars, just the second time since 2005 that so many Texas prisoners have taken their lives in six days, according to data analyzed by the Texas Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that publishes data on the Texas criminal justice system.

Nationwide, prison suicides have been increasing for years, and some experts worry worsening conditions and staff shortages brought on by the pandemic may accelerate that rise. Delays in data reporting, though, make it difficult to tell: The most recent national figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed an 85% increase in state and federal prison suicides from 2001 to 2018, but 2020 data won’t come out until next year.

“We need to find out how prisons are allowing these to happen,” said Leah Wang, a research analyst with the Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy nonprofit group. “Without recent and reliable data, we can't do much meaningful enforcement or policymaking.”

Read the full article about suicides in Texas prisons by Keri Blakinger at The Marshall Project.