Long-time readers surely recall a number of articles in this space about the aging US prison population. Here is another via the Philadelphia Inquirer under the headline "More people than ever are dying in prison. Their caregivers? Other inmates." Here is how it gets started:
“The death squad.” Or, “the executioners.” That’s what many inmates used to call the inmate-volunteers who work the Graterford state prison hospice unit, a bleak row of isolation rooms — each one-part hospital room, one-part jail cell— where inmates with terminal illnesses are placed to die.
Then, they saw how the inmates cared for dying men in shifts, undertaking the intimate tasks of feeding, cleaning and comforting them. For many, it is a calling. Over time, attitudes changed, said James, a 51-year-old inmate who volunteers to do this work. “There’s a lot of progress in this place. There is more humanity here now.”
It’s needed, given that far more people are dying in prison than ever before. In Pennsylvania, 483 state inmates have died since January 2015. That’s about 180 deaths in prison each year. From 2005 to 2014, the average was 150 deaths per year.
That increase is a byproduct, officials say, of the extraordinarily fast-growing elderly population in prison. In 2001, there were 1,892 geriatric inmates in Pennsylvania (ages 55 or older). Today, that’s more than tripled to 6,458. The leading causes of death in the state’s prisons are heart disease, cancer and liver disease. Caring for this population is extraordinarily expensive: It’s estimated that elderly inmates cost three to nine times more than young ones. Compassionate release, meanwhile, is granted to just a few inmates each year.
But since 2004, families of dying inmates at Graterford have had the small comfort of knowing they will not die alone. There is just one nurse on staff at the 23-bed infirmary, and visitors are allowed only an hour a day, but volunteers man the hospice on 24-hour vigils, sometimes caring for two or three inmates at once.
A year ago, a statewide memo ordered that all Pennsylvania prisons establish hospice programs, but there’s no set format for those programs to follow, said Annette Kowalewski, who runs the hospice program at Laurel Highlands state prison, which contains a skilled-nursing facility. Staff at five or six institutions have contacted her for guidance.
According to Brie Williams, a professor at University of California-San Francisco who studies geriatric care in prison, some type of hospice care is offered at around 80 prisons nationwide. “Hospices in the correctional setting are a critically needed response to the extraordinarily long sentences and minimum mandatory sentences that were handed down over the past decades,” she said.
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