This story contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Louis Vela, Jr. had been banging his head on the wall of his cell, where he was placed after threatening to kill himself.
Several employees were near Vela’s holding cell inside the Indiana State Prison’s medical building. A nurse’s station and correctional officers were just a few feet away. The wall of his cell had a window, so that an officer sitting at a desk on the other side could check on him periodically. Nearby was a stool for a suicide watch companion, a fellow inmate tasked with keeping an eye on him. And because he was on suicide watch, officers were supposed to regularly document his movements.
Yet, without anyone seemingly noticing, he somehow found a piece of fabric, tied it around the bars and around his neck. By the time someone walked to the window to check on Vela, he was dead.
The 38-year-old’s death shook employees, said Lori Utesch, a former clinical mental health specialist at the prison who was working the day Vela died. Prisoners, including those who like Vela were convicted of murder, are often forgotten by society. But to healthcare workers like Utesch, each death tells a heartbreaking story of a system that’s supposed to rehabilitate but has failed.
“How in the hell does something like this happen with all these people around him, with a companion that’s supposed to be watching him?” she said. “It blew our minds. It just absolutely blew our minds.”
But the answer quickly became clear to Utesch: “He wasn’t being watched.”
A worsening suicide crisis
Vela’s June 25, 2024, death, which was described to IndyStar by Utesch and another former mental health employee, is part of a suicide crisis at the Northwest Indiana maximum security facility that has seen more such deaths than any prison in the state.
From 2019 to August 2025, the prison had 27 inmate suicides, according to the Indiana Department of Correction’s mortality data. That’s a third of all suicides across IDOC’s 21 facilities.
Now, that problem has been exacerbated.
Nearly all the prison’s mental health employees — the very same licensed professionals whose job was to provide therapy and other services to men like Vela — recently left within weeks, some even days, of each other. That leaves Indiana State Prison, which has the highest suicide rate per capita in the state’s correctional system, with a decimated mental health department.
One of those employees was Utesch who, up until earlier this year, worked for Centurion Health, a Virginia-based contractor that has faced lawsuits in other states over allegations of providing substandard care. In 2021, the state of Indiana awarded Centurion a four-year contract to provide comprehensive healthcare services to prisoners. The cost — $643 million — was the most expensive among all vendor proposals. The contract, which was extended last year, is set to expire March 31.
Prisons are required to provide medical care to inmates as the result of a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which found deliberate indifference to a prisoner’s serious illness constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
But in interviews with IndyStar, Utesch and several former mental health employees described failures by Centurion to address the psychological health of a volatile population and by the prison to confront the underlying issues that cause suicides. Too often, they said, rules to prevent inmates from killing themselves are not followed.
Utesch, for example, said it’s common for inmates on suicide watch to have contraband items, like razor blades.
“They’re cutting themselves,” she said, “while on suicide watch.”
In Vela’s case, his suicide companion was allowed to walk around, Utesch said. If an officer was documenting Vela’s movements, she was not aware of it. In practice, she said officers almost never follow such rules.
“The exception is getting documentation from officers,” said another former mental health employee who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “It’s very rare.”
Drug use, which is often tied to mental illness, is rampant, with inmates relying on a bountiful supply of narcotics moving within the prison, former employees said. Uninhabitable living conditions and prolonged lockdowns drive already troubled inmates over the edge, they said. Those who spoke up said their concerns were often ignored or met with hostility from officers and supervisors.
One former mental health staffer recalled watching her boss get screamed at on multiple occasions for reporting what she believed to be human rights violations. Another time, an officer told her they’d been instructed by supervisors to “ignore” inmates’ drug use. When she raised concerns, she was told to “fall in line or resign.”
“It’s a culture of silence and lying,” she said.
It’s unclear how many staffers have been hired since the recent exodus. Centurion did not respond to multiple requests for comment. IDOC declined to grant an interview. Neither responded to an emailed list of allegations by former mental health staffers.
At most, former employees said Centurion had seven mental health workers at the prison, where inmate population hovers around 2,000. Six were licensed mental health providers. All six either resigned or were fired in recent months.
“I’ve worked at a different facility where we had 11 psychologists available for 600 inmates,” said another former mental health staffer. “Right now, I don’t know what (services) the inmates are getting.”
‘They know the guys are high’
Utesch worked in a correctional setting because she’d long been drawn to the challenges of confronting severe mental illness. But she saw many things that troubled her in the two years she worked at the prison.
Chief among them was the drug use inside the facility and what appeared to be an open tolerance among officers. She and other former employees said drugs are so common, even in the prison’s restrictive housing unit, that they’ve become familiar with the smell of methamphetamine.
In some cases, the former employees said, drug use inside housing units was so blatant that they could see smoke coming out of inmates’ cells — in plain view of officers.
“They know the guys are high,” Utesch said. “Officers are just not in a rush to see what’s going on.”
Another former employee recalled going to the prison’s restrictive housing unit to assess a patient and seeing — right in front of her and the officer escorting her — an inmate passing a clear plastic bag with white substance to a neighboring cell.
It’s unclear exactly how many suicides are tied to drug use. At least two suicides at the prison in 2024 were tied to overdose, according to IDOC’s data. In at least five other suicides last year, methamphetamine and alcohol were found in the inmates’ systems, although the data did not indicate if the inmates had overdosed.
One inmate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said prisoners self-medicate because there’s nothing else to do. He said he has consumed marijuana, K2 or spice, cocaine and methamphetamine.
“It’s hard for me to stop,” the inmate said.
As he spoke, loud screaming could be heard in the background. He said inmates often scream about what they need. Others, he said, are going through a mental health crisis.
“This noise is all day,” he said. “It never stops.”
‘Squalor’ conditions, psychosis are tied to suicides, ex-staffers say
Former staffers described what one of them said were “squalor” living conditions inside the prison’s decades-old housing units, where winters are bitterly cold and summers are unbearably hot.
Birds fly freely inside, leaving behind droppings. Cells are sometimes caked with vomit, blood and feces. Some inmates sit in dark cells. Drinking water is either cloudy or brown. Basic needs, such as toilet paper, blankets, personal hygiene products, are not being met, they said. Utesch recalled seeing patients who’d worn the same clothes for several months. In the middle of a freezing winter, she watched inmates being walked in the snow wearing only shower shoes, if they wore any footwear at all.
The living conditions compounded mental health problems that inmates had before they were incarcerated or developed behind bars, former staffers said. Some inmates resort to assaulting employees, throwing bodily fluids at them or starting fires that leave remnants of smoke damage on walls.
“There is really an incredibly outsized amount of psychosis,” said a former employee. She acknowledged that some inmates lie about being in crisis, “but there are also many, many people who are genuinely depressed, feel dehumanized, feel suicidal in a very real way because of the suffering that they’re enduring.”
Each time she raised concerns about the conditions, she said, nothing happened.
“I cannot think of a single time that I reported a law violation, like a human rights violation,” she said, “that it was actually rectified.”
Deaths lead to fingerpointing but no meaningful change, ex-staffers say
When inmates died, former staffers said neither Centurion nor the prison addressed the underlying issues. Instead, fingerpointing ensued.
In Vela’s case, Utesch said the suicide watch companion was fired.
In another death that happened less than two months after Vela died, the mental health staff was largely blamed.
Randall Conliff was found dead in his cell on Aug. 21, 2024. Utesch and another former employee said the 42-year-old inmate’s head was wrapped in a plastic bag filled with water. His death certificate lists asphyxiation, drowning and methamphetamine intoxication as causes of death.
Conliff, who was in prison for drug charges, missed a mental health appointment months before his death, Utesch said, adding that it’s common for inmates to not show up to appointments. But because they did not check on him afterward, she explained, they were blamed.
“If we did that for every inmate,” she said, “that would be our full-time job.”
It’s unclear what drove Vela or Conliff to suicide.
IndyStar was unable to find family members of Vela who are willing to speak. A half-sister said she barely knew him and found out he’d died only after a reporter reached out.
In Conliff’s case, his relatives question if he really killed himself.
Barbara Conliff talked to her son on the phone just days before his death, and he seemed the happiest he’d been in years. He was optimistic about moving to a better housing unit. He asked about his sons. He was looking forward to getting out of prison and being a father to his boys again.
“He had a reason to live,” said Christina Conliff, one of his sisters
After her son died, Barbara Conliff said she received a call from Ron Neal, the prison’s warden.
“The warden said something like, ‘Well, we have a lot of deaths here,'” she recalled. “He said it so casually like it’s nothing.”
How her son died consumes her to this day. Almost daily, she’s haunted by what his last moments must have been like.
“The pain he could’ve went through,” she said, her voice breaking, “dying.”
‘It’s quantity of care’
By the end of 2025, the prison had seen the highest number of suicides in recent years. During a November 2025 meeting with Centurion’s health services administrator at the prison, Utesch said she and others were told they “were the reason for the breakdown.”
“The issue is systemic,” she said, adding that they had little to no control over the other factors at play, like the drug use. “We don’t have a say in the ridiculous amount of drugs that were being brought in.”
As the already understaffed department shrunk, former staffers said they were asked to take on more patients. Centurion’s priority, one former employee said, is to make sure there isn’t a backlog of patients who are overdue to be seen because this could result in the company being fined.
On busy days, therapists at the prison saw 10 to 11 inmates, Utesch said. Later, she was told to see 15 to 20 patients a day. That does not include screening inmates who were placed on restrictive housing and suicide watches.
“It’s not quality of care,” she said. “It’s quantity of care.”
Utesch submitted her resignation letter on Jan. 4, 2026. By then, she said she was the only licensed mental health provider left. Two, including one who was newly hired, had resigned. Two others said they’d been walked off prison grounds — the kind of ramification staffers who were caught trafficking drugs face — after they raised concerns about the inmates’ living conditions. The head psychologist, they said, had been unfairly blamed for the rising number of suicides and fired.
One former employee said she left because she felt “expendable” and unimportant.
In her resignation letter, Utesch addressed Neal, the prison’s warden.
“I will not be the one to blame when there is another death,” she wrote, “which unfortunately is inevitable given the current circumstances and your unwillingness to acknowledge and address them appropriately.”
Contact IndyStar reporter Kristine Phillips at (317) 444-3026 or at kphillips@indystar.com.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: This prison had a suicide crisis. Then it lost its mental health staff.
Reporting by Kristine Phillips, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
