The article explains the relationship between inmates' race, socioeconomic status, and suicide through a combination of phenomenological perspectives on deviance and suicide, theories of inmate social organization, and excerpts from inmate interviews and inmate poetry. Inmates whose preincarceration social reality orientation is incongruent with the inmate subculture are in a double-deviant status, experiencing social isolation and an ensuing state of anomie, because of their marginal status in the prison community and the prison community's marginal status in the dominant culture. Social reality for these inmates, who are predominantly white and middle-class, becomes radically modified. Suicide is a cognitive response to a perceived state of social isolation, a sense of being out of touch and feeling alone in a world of existential chaos. Suicide is not perceived as an end but as a means of transforming the inmate's social existence. As a transcendental act, suicide is the nexus between the inmate's intention to find meaning and the possibility of its realization. Notes, references