Unsilent Generation

Entries categorized as ‘death / end of life care and choices’

Profs to Design “Toolkit” to Help Old People Die Right in Prison

February 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Over the last few months I have been posting articles on the graying of the U.S. prison population. Beyond the humanitarian implications, this is a cause of growing concern because of inflating costs due to treating people with arthritis, cancer, hip and knee replacement and so on behind bars. Older people fall more often, have trouble climbing into bunk beds because of arthritis, and suffer from depression and dementia. Unlike younger prisoners, they tend to be a fairly docile lot, and are more often the victim than the aggressor in prison assaults. They are obvious candidates for early release as prisons are eyed as targets for cuts in cash-strapped state budgets.

For years prison rights organizations and families have sought to persuade states and the federal government to free elderly  terminally ill inmates into the care of family or friends. But prisons and politicians have generally deemed such compassionate release programs too “high risk” because of the possible security threat to the general populace–in other words, they worry grandpa might get out and go berserk, and they’d be left holding the bag if he committed a new crime.

Places like Angola, the giant Louisiana state prison where most inmates have such long sentences that they are destined to die inside, have dealt with this situation by setting up their own hospices. Now, Penn State has received a $1.27 million grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research to develop what Susan Loeb, an assistant professor, described to the student newspaper the Daily Collegian as a “comprehensive toolkit of tailored resources for end-of-life care in prisons.” The article continues:

Leaders of the program plan to apply study findings at six different prisons state-wide in an attempt to improve care for inmates reaching the end of their lives, wrote Loeb, the principal investigator for the study.

“Since prisons are among the most restrictive, most complex organizations — prisons are the best context for this study,” Loeb wrote. “Our hope is that findings will benefit not only dying inmates but also others who spend their final days in a complex organization.”

Though the study is still in the early stages, researchers are quickly learning, said Christopher Hollenbeak, associate professor of surgery and health evaluation sciences and an investigator on the study. “The real goal of it is to come up with a tool in prisons to improve the quality-of-life care,” Hollenbeak said. “We want to provide a toolkit that would be cost-effective as well.” Current end-of-life prison programs only offer limited low-cost medications. One proposed change is the “buddy system,” where healthy inmates are paired with a terminally ill inmate to help look out for them, Hollenbeak said.

I suppose it’s a worthy effort, given the current situation. But none of it would be necessary if American society could get over its desire for punishment and revenge just enough to let these inmates die in the free world.

Categories: Aging Behind Bars · death / end of life care and choices · health care · prisons / criminal justice
Tagged: , , ,

Happy New Year, Geezers. Please Die Soon.

December 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment

The Wall Street Journal reports today on a temporary suspension of the estate tax (what conservatives call the “death tax”), which will go into effect on January 1, 2010.  The lapse dates back to the bundle of tax cuts passed under the Bush Administration in 2001:

Congress raised estate-tax exemptions, culminating with the tax’s disappearance next year. However, due to budget constraints, lawmakers didn’t make the change permanent. So the estate tax is due to come back to life in 2011–at a higher rate and lower exemption.

The WSJ piece is titled “Rich Cling to Life to Beat Tax Man,” and its interviews demonstrate, once again, that the rich really are different: They’re really creepy. It seems quite a few of them are making end-of-life decisions based on how it will affect their inheritance taxes.

“I have two clients on life support, and the families are struggling with whether to continue heroic measures for a few more days,” says Joshua Rubenstein, a lawyer with Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP in New York. “Do they want to live for the rest of their lives having made serious medical decisions based on estate-tax law?”…

To make it easier on their heirs, some clients are putting provisions into their health-care proxies allowing whoever makes end-of-life medical decisions to consider changes in estate-tax law. “We have done this at least a dozen times, and have gotten more calls recently,” says Andrew Katzenstein, a lawyer with Proskauer Rose LLP in Los Angeles.

The article focuses on people who are trying to keep their so-called loved ones alive until 2010 begins. But you can just as easily imagine all the  greedy bastards out there who are hoping their healthy old relatives will get really sick, really soon, so they can kick off before the year ends.

On the Atlantic’s business blog today, Derek Thompson comments on the political implications of the year-long estate tax suspension. He highlights the hypocrisy of Republican policymaking, which that insists upon deficit reduction while simultaneously serving the interests of wealthy people like these, whose riches have to be wrested from their cold, dead hands:

I’ll be interested to watch how both parties deal with the tax for 2011. Naturally, Republicans are united against any action that involves not destroying the death tax forever. That includes Sen. Judd Gregg, the moderate Republican and co-producer of the fantastical commission to reduce the deficit, who has consistently supported every effort to whittle away the estate tax.

Obviously, one way to reduce the deficit is to reduce spending. But another way is to raise taxes — or at least to not kill the taxes that we already have in place. The Lincoln-Kyl bill in the Senate to cut estate taxes after the one-year hiccup would cost almost $250 billion over 10 years. That is, as they say, real money, and it’s hard for me to imagine how this tax cut would spur economic growth, since inheritance is passive. If we’re going to consider spending over the baseline part of PAYGO, we should do the same for government receipts below the baseline. So would Republicans plan to make up that money?

Categories: Bush Administration · Congress · budget / tax policy · death / end of life care and choices · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues
Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Graying of America’s Prisons

December 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment

The following appears as Part One of a two-part Special Report on The Crime Report (TCR), which is “a collaborative effort by two national organizations that focus on encouraging quality criminal justice reporting:  The  Center on Media, Crime and Justice, the nation’s leading practice-oriented think tank on crime and justice reporting, and Criminal Justice Journalists, the nation’s only membership organization of crime-beat journalists.” I’ll post Part Two as soon as it appears on TCR.

Frank Soffen, now 70 years old, has lived more than half his life in prison, and will likely die there.

Sentenced to life for second-degree murder, Soffen has suffered four heart attacks and is confined to a wheelchair.  He has lately been held in the assisted living wing of Massachusetts’ Norfolk prison. Because of his failing health and his exemplary record over his 37 years behind bars—which includes rescuing a guard being threatened by other inmates—Soffen has been held up as a candidate for release on medical and compassionate grounds.

He is physically incapable of committing a violent crime, has already participated in pre-release and furlough programs, and has a supportive family and a place to live with his son. One of the members of the Massachusetts state parole board spoke in favor of his release. But in 2006 the board voted to deny Soffen parole. He will not be eligible for review for another five years.

The “tough on crime” posturing and policymaking that have dominated American politics for more than three decades have left behind a grim legacy. Longer sentences and harsher parole standards have led to overcrowded prisons, overtaxed state budgets, and devastated families and communities. Now, yet another consequence is becoming visible in the nation’s prisons and jails: a huge and ever-growing numbers of geriatric inmates.

Increasingly, the cells and dormitories of the United States are filled with old, often sick men and women. They hobble around the tiers with walkers or roll in wheelchairs. They fill prison infirmaries, assisted living wings, and hospices faster than the state and federal governments can build them—and since many are dying behind bars, they are filling the mortuaries and graveyards as well.

The care these aging prisoners receive, while often grossly inadequate, is nonetheless cripplingly expensive—so much so that some recession-strapped states are for the first time seriously considering releasing older terminally ill and mentally ill prisoners rather than pay the heavy price for their warehousing. It remains to be seen what will happen when such fiscal concerns run head on into America’s taste for punitive justice. A recent report by the Vera Institute made this clear.

Politicians no doubt did not imagine this Dickensian landscape of the elderly incarcerated when they voted to lengthen sentences and impose mandatory minimums three or four decades ago. But their actions are yielding an inevitable outcome.  While the graying of the prison population to some extent reflects the changing demographics of the populace at large, it owes considerably more to changes in law and policy. And this is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

According to the Sentencing Project, the United States imprisons five times as many people as it did 30 years ago and more than seven times as many as it did 40 years ago. Our criminal justice system now keeps 2.3 million people behind bars—about half of them for drug offenses and other nonviolent crimes. Twenty-five years ago, there were 34,000 prisoners serving life sentences; today the number is more than 140,000. The fact that each person is spending a longer stretch behind bars means that the falling crime rates of the 1990s do not translate into fewer inmates. It also means that more and more people who committed offenses in their 20s or even their teens are growing old and dying in prison.

The situation is particularly stark in California, Texas and Florida, which have large prison populations with cells crammed to overflowing because of harsh sentencing laws. In California, the population of prisoners over 55 doubled in the ten years from 1997 to 2006. About 20 percent of California prisoners are serving life sentences, and over 10 percent are serving life without the possibility of parole. Louisiana’s prison system now holds more than 5,000 people over the age of 50—a three-fold increase in the last 12 years.

While 50 or 55 may not be old by conventional standards, people age faster behind bars than they do on the outside: Studies have shown that prisoners in their 50s are on average physiologically 10 to 15 years older than their chronological age. Older prisoners require substantial medical care, because of harsh life conditions as well as age. Inmates begin to have trouble climbing to upper bunks, walking, standing on line, and handling other parts of the prison routine. They suffer from early losses of hearing and eyesight, have high rates of high blood pressure and diabetes, and are susceptible to falls.

A recent study by Brie Williams and Rita Albraldes, published as a chapter in the book Growing Older: Challenges of Prison and Reentry for the Aging Population, found that in addition to the chronic diseases that increase with age, older offenders have problems such as paraplegia because of the legacy of gunshot wounds. Many have  advanced liver disease, renal disease, or hepatitis. Still others suffer from HIV-AIDS, and many more from drug and alcohol abuse. Living under prison conditions, they are more likely to get pneumonia and flu.

Many prisons are notorious for not taking their inmates’ health complaints seriously, and there is anecdotal evidence this problem may be compounded when prisoners are elderly. A doctor under contract in one southern prison told me in a recent interview how a diabetic man’s illness was misdiagnosed, resulting in months of excruciating pain and the amputation of toes and part of one foot. Back in prison, the man asked for prosthetic shoes so he could get around by walking; his request was denied.

Another elderly prisoner complained of an earache which went untreated for months.  When it became unbearably painful, the prisoner was shipped to a local hospital emergency room, under contract to the prison. There the doctors found the earache was brain cancer—by then, too advanced to treat.

The exploding prison population has further undermined the already questionable quality of inmate medical care. In California, which has the nation’s largest number of state prisoners, a panel of federal judges earlier this year found that the state of medical care was so poor that it violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and was in danger of routinely costing prisoners their lives. The only solution, the judges said, was to reduce prison overcrowding caused by the states draconian mandatory sentences. The court recommended shortening sentences and reforming parole, which they believed would have no impact on public safety; it has given California three years to comply.

To come in Part Two:  Challenging the status quo for geriatric prisoners

Categories: Aging Behind Bars · age discrimination · death / end of life care and choices · health care · legal issues · mental health care · prisons / criminal justice
Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Whether to Execute Man at 94

September 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

 Here in its entirety is a brief item from the Arizona Republic:

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday sent the case of Arizona Death Row inmate Viva Leroy Nash back to a lower court to determine if he is mentally competent to assist in his appeals.

Nash, who turned 94 last week, has a criminal record that goes back to the 1930s.

He spent 25 years in prison for shooting a Connecticut police officer in 1947, and he was sentenced to life in prison for shooting a man to death in Salt Lake City in 1977. But he escaped from a prison work crew in October 1982, and a month later, already 67 years old, he shot and killed a Phoenix coin shop sales clerk named Greg West. He was sentenced to death for that murder.

But Nash’s attorneys argue that his diminishing competence hampers his ability to communicate on legal matters. And on Sept. 11, a panel of judges at the 9th circuit ruled that he was entitled to a competence hearing. The case was remanded to the U.S. District Court in Phoenix

Categories: death / end of life care and choices · generations / intergenerational issues · legal issues · prisons / criminal justice
Tagged: , ,

The Phony Age Gap War

September 14, 2009 · 3 Comments

In “Politics and the Age Gap,” featured in yesterday’s New York Times, Adam Nagourney adds to the litany of recent articles that position old people as a primary obstacle to health care reform. In part, the target of these pieces is the tea party geezers who rant about socialism–but it goes well beyond that. Seniors tend to be depicted, explicitly or implicity, as obstinate or selfish because they fear cutbacks in Medicare will be made in order to provide health care for younger people. What’s more, they refuse to accept that Medicare must be cut back to keep it from going bankrupt before younger generations even get to use it. Thus, the argument goes, what’s really going on in the health care struggle is a fight by the old against the young, in which we miserly old coots are unwilling to give up what we’ve got for the sake of the greater good. “As the population ages and the nation faces intense battles over rapidly rising health care and retirement costs,” Nagourney writes, ”American politics seems increasingly divided along generational lines.”

But the whole intergenerational conflict is a phony one. This health reform debate is about substituting a trumped up intergenerational war for what ought to be class war–pitting the old against the young, instead of pitting the rich against the poor, or the corporations against the little guy. 

If health reform moves forward, there surely will be cuts to Medicare–that isn’t some fantasy of demented old folks. And you can be sure the cuts won’t only apply, as promised, to “waste and inefficiency.” But the real scandal is this: The only reason that any cuts at all need to made to Medicare is because pols are unwilling to cut the profits of insurance and drug companies. That’s where the money to finance health reform really should be coming from.

In other countries, single-payer systems deliver better health care at far lower cost.  If we did the same here–or at least made moves in that direction–there would be enough for everyone. We could have Medicare for all–the young as well as the old.

But that, of course, wouldn’t serve the interests of corporations or their conservative cronies. The interests in question are not only those of the drug and insurance companies, but of the financial giants on Wall Street. As Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote back in January:

The classic definition of “chutzpah” is the kid who kills both of his parents and then begs for mercy because he is an orphan. The Wall Street crew are out to top this. After wrecking the economy with their convoluted finances, and tapping the US Treasury for trillions in bail-out bucks, they now want to cut Social Security and Medicare because we don’t have the money.

And here’s what I myself wrote on the subject a while back:

Advocates for the preservation of so-called old-age entitlements have been warning for some time that Social Security and Medicare may be offered up as a sacrifice to offset the cost of the bailout and stimulus. This would suit conservatives, who for years have been looking for ways to undermine the popular programs. Leading that charge are the the “granny bashers” hunkered around the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. With an endowment of $1 billion, the Foundation pursues an agenda that consists mainly of bitching and moaning that greedy geezers are taking money away from poor young things with their unconscionable demands for basic health care and income support. With increasing support from the media, the punditry, and some members of Congress, they warn that aging boomers will soon bankrupt the country and destroy the lives of future generations.

These dire predictions are surfacing again–but what’s now driving the move toward entitlement cuts isn’ t the bailout, but health care reform. And because Democrats aren’t willing to stand up to the force that’s most reponsible for soaring health care costs–the U.S. system of medicine-for-profit–they are playing right into this hand, jumping on the Medicare-cutting bandwagon.

In the end, old folks are likely to end up getting screwed by Medicare cuts–right at a time when we’ve already been screwed from several other angles. More from Dean Baker: 

The recent collapse of the housing bubble and the resulting stock market plunge have reduced the wealth of older workers and retirees by close to $15 trillion. This is a transfer to the young, since they will be able to buy the housing stock and the corporate capital stock for a far lower price than they would have expected to pay just two years ago.

Remarkably, the granny basher crew has somehow failed to notice this enormous transfer of wealth from the old to the young. They just continue their crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare as though nothing has happened.

It should be evident that the granny bashers don’t care at all about generational equity. They care about dismantling Social Security and Medicare, the country’s most important social programs. It is important that the public recognize the granny bashers’ real agenda so that they can give them the respect they deserve.

In view of all this, it’s no surprise that old folks have started to get paranoid, feeling like our country is getting ready to sweep us out with the trash. Too bad so many old people are wasting their  time tilting at bogus adversaries like the death panels, instead of at their real enemies of their golden years.

Categories: Congress · Medicare · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · age discrimination · corporations · death / end of life care and choices · drug industry · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · health insurance industry · older workers · pensions / retirement funds · poverty
Tagged: , , , , , ,

Ten Questions on Health Care to Ask at a Town Meeting

August 12, 2009 · 3 Comments

This from a buzzflash.com guest blog by Dave Lindorff, based on an idea from one of his readers. Should you go to one of the town hall meetings on health care reform, here are 10 good questions to ask. The questions about Medicare, which I’ve highlighted in boldface, are especially good ones for older people to ask. This is especially important because the media seems to be full of tales of loony geezers claiming the government is going to mess up their Medicare–if it doesn’t euthanize them first.

1. If Canada’s single-payer system is so god-awful, why have repeated Conservative governments at the provincial and national level in Canada never touched it? Canada is a democracy. If Canadians don’t like their health care system, why haven’t they gotten rid of it in 35 years? Since the system there is run by the separate provinces, many of which are very politically conservative, why has not one province ever tried to get rid of single-payer?
2. Why is rationing by income, as we do it here, better than rationing by need, as they do it in Canada?
3. Wouldn’t single-payer mean that companies could no longer threaten working people with the loss of their health insurance? Why is this a bad idea?
4. The bigger the insurance pool, the better. So doesn’t having a national pool, as with single-payer, make the most sense?
5. Why should we be allowing politicians who are taking money from the medical industry to write the new health care legislation?
6. How can the Congress be developing a health system reform scheme and not even invite experts from Canada down to explain their successful system?
7. If Medicare–a single-payer system here in America–is so popular with the elderly, how come it’s no good for the rest of us?
8. Isn’t it true that Medicare currently finances the most costly patient group–the elderly and infirm–so that extending it to the rest of the population–most of whom are young and healthy–would be much cheaper, per person?
9. The AMA, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the Insurance Industry all bitterly opposed Medicare in 1964-5 when it was being debated in Congress and passed into law, with the right, led by Ronald Reagan, calling it creeping socialism. It became a life-saver for the elderly and didn’t turn the US into a soviet republic. Why should we give a tinker’s damn what those same three industry groups and the Republican right think of expanding single-payer now?
10. The executives of Canadian subsidiaries of US companies all support Canada’s single-payer system, and even lobby collectively to have it expanded and better funded. Why does Congress listen to the executives of the parent companies here at home, and not invite those Canadian execs down to explain why they like single-payer?

Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · corporations · death / end of life care and choices · drug industry · health care · health insurance industry · media
Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

How the British Handle a Dying Prisoner

August 7, 2009 · Leave a Comment

AGING BEHIND BARS SERIES

There is an inane debate going on in the United States about whether to allow old and dying prisoners out of jail for their final days and months. Not long ago I described the aging, sick prisoner at Angola prison who was denied his plea to be allowed to die in the “free world.” The prisoin wouldn’t release the living man, but only his dead body–which, according to his wishes, was cremated by a friend, then placed in a Viking boat he had built in the Angola hobby shop, and towed out to sea where the boat and ashes were set afire.

By way of contrast, here is the way the British handle this situation. Ronnie Biggs,79, who was convicted for the famous 1963 Great Train Robbery (and who later escaped and spent years on the lam), was freed from prison on compassionate grounds because he is unlikely to recover from pneumonia.

According to the BBC, Biggs’s son, Michael, said, “My father has served a very long time in prison…In comparison to sentences which are being handed out nowadays it’s pathetic that anyone would expect my father to serve 30 years for taking part in a train robbery…The reasons why my father didn’t get parole is, he didn’t show any repentance. My father did show remorse all through the years for having committed a crime. However, he has never regretted living the life he did, because had he done that he would never have had me as a son.”

As for the crime, here is the BBC description of what happened:

Biggs, originally from Lambeth, south London, was a member of a 15-strong gang which attacked the Glasgow to London mail train at Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, in August 1963, and made off with £2.6m in used banknotes.

The train’s driver, Jack Mills, suffered head injuries during the robbery.

Biggs was given a 30-year sentence, but after 15 months he escaped from Wandsworth prison, in south-west London, by climbing a 30ft wall and fleeing in a furniture van.

He was on the run for more than 30 years, living in Australia and Brazil, before returning to the UK voluntarily in 2001 in search of medical treatment.

Categories: Aging Behind Bars · death / end of life care and choices · international · legal issues · prisons / criminal justice
Tagged: , , ,

Will Health Care Debate Fuel GOP Election Victory?

August 4, 2009 · 4 Comments

With polls showing the Republicans on the rebound, the right wing is ecstatic as conservatives drive to cut Democratic majorities in Congress and win state governorships this fall. More important, the purported rebound may well help them make the timid Democrats appear even more timid as the health care debate reaches a climax smack in the midst of the election campaign. If Obama can’t win a little something in the health insurance fight, he’ll be portrayed more and more as a flop by the right wing. If he wins even a token victory, the GOP attack dogs will nail him as a socialist with a secret plan to “kill Granny”’ by rationing health care. Not true, but that’s the current GOP attack campaign. The Washington Times Tuesday morning lays out the coming attack:

It would be hard to envision a political landscape as tilted against Republicans as it was in 2006 and 2008. There is now a body of polling data to suggest that the generic congressional ballot has closed. In the NBC/Wall Street Journal, Democrats have a seven-point advantage, the smallest it’s been since April of 2006,” said Jennifer Duffy, senior elections analyst at the Cook Political Report.

The papers goes on to cite data from Rasmussen,Rothenberg and Gallup,which it quotes as saying last week,, ” at this early stage, 2010 does not look like it is shaping up to be as strong a Democratic year as 2006 was, and that could make it difficult for the party to hold onto the gains it made in the 2006 midterm and 2008 presidential elections,” the polling organization said.

Categories: 2010 elections · Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · death / end of life care and choices · health care · media · right wing
Tagged: , ,

Randall Terry: Obama Wants to Kill Granny with Death Care

August 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

As I recently predicted, right wingers are rolling out scare tactics to turn people against health care reform. The creepiest of the lot is the myth that Obama’s socialist government is planning to create the setting for euthanasia. This has special resonance with Catholic and fundamentalist protestant groups, which the Republican right always want to assuage. Drawing in more and more Catholics is especially important to keeping this base alive and festering. The phony euthanasia scare could also give new energy (and new funding sources) to the right-to-lifers, who are caught between a pro-choice federal government on one side, and on the other a radical fringe that thinks shooting doctors outside their churches is heroic act.

Art by Colin S from the animation and art blog.

Art by Colin S from the animation and art blog.

Former Operation Rescue head Randall Terry, forever trying to resuscitate himself, is a leader in the drive to stop the President’s “death care.” The Washington Post on Saturday reported how Betsy McCaughey, the whacko former New York pol and health care reform assassin, told former senator and flopped GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson on talk radio that the health reform bill contained mandatory counseling sessions for seniors how to “to end their life sooner”‘–by showing them how to “decline nutrition..and cut your life short.”

What is all this about? According to the Post:

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.

But on right-leaning radio programs, religious e-mail lists and Internet blogs, the proposal has been described as “guiding you in how to die,” “an ORDER from the Government to end your life,” promoting “death care” and, in the words of antiabortion leader Randall Terry, an attempt to “kill Granny.”…

In the past two weeks, AARP has fielded a few thousand calls from people who mistakenly think the legislation would require every Medicare recipient to “choose how they want to die,” said James Dau, a spokesman for the organization.

At a recent AARP session on healthcare reform, Obama was asked about “rumors” his reforms would include the so-called death care initiative. The President answered the question by discussing living wills, which both he and and his wife have.

That makes sense, right? Getting a living will to kill yourself?

Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · age discrimination · death / end of life care and choices · health care · health insurance industry · legal issues · right wing
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Prisons Becoming Warehouses for the Old

July 25, 2009 · 4 Comments

AGING BEHIND BARS SERIES

I have written hefore about the aging population in American prisons and jails, due in large part to the draconian sentencing policies of the courts, federal, state, and local. As a result these places seem destined to become nursing homes surrounded by razor wire.  

Angola prison in Louisiana, for instance, boasts that some 90 percent of its population will die there. The prison has managed to equip itself with a hospice, and trained inmates to attend to a convict’s last days. Burl Cain, the warden, is backed up by a phalanx of Christian fundamentalist preachers who freely roam the 18,000 acre former slave plantation recruiting inmates to be preachers. The clergy instruct  prisoners their only way out is through redemption made possible by the  acceptance of Jesus Christ. When an elderly inmate, knowing his end was near, sought to be win release so as to die in the so-called “free world,” the parole board refused. The procedure is to go to your death in the Christian way–from cell to hospice to a prison cemetery where your grave will be dug by the inmates who will mark your bruial with gospel hymns

 The travesty at Angola is held up as a model  for the nation and Cain celebrated by the media  as a new corrections messiah. Elsewhere,old,sick people,piled into these living tombs by the courts, stand in line for hours to get an aspirin; arthritic old women  are made to climb into upper bunk beds.Parapalegic men are denied canes, which are ruled to be weapons, and instead must crawl to the toilets.People are locked in solitary for years. Mentally ill convicts who act out in the general population are put into solitary because they howl and scream in public.  Locked down, they go truly mad. Old sex offenders can be released into the hands of friends or family. but often noone wants them, so they are released to the county jail, reindicted, and sent back to prison.

The American public is  up in arms about  CIA jails in far away places. But it  could care less about American prisons. Now a new report by the Sentencing Project in Washington adds to the growing body of information about  prisons here at home. No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America contains, among other things, the first nationwide collection of life sentence data documenting race, ethnicity and gender, and reveals “overwhelming racial and ethnic disparities in the allocation of life sentences”: 66% of all persons sentenced to life are non-white, and 77% of juveniles serving  life sentences are non-white.

  The the report’s key findings:

140,610 individuals are serving life sentences, representing one of every 11 people (9.5%) in prison. Twenty-nine percent (41,095) of the individuals serving life sentences have no possibility of parole.

The number of individuals serving life without parole sentences increased by22% from 33,633 to 41,095 between 2003 and 2008. This is nearly four times the rate of growth of the parole-eligible life sentenced population.

In five states—Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and New York—at least 1 in 6 people in prison are serving a life sentence.

The highest proportion of life sentences relative to the prison population is in California, where 20% of the prison population is serving a life sentence, up from 18.1% in 2003. Among these 34,164 life sentences, 10.8% are life without parole.

Racial and ethnic minorities serve a disproportionate share of life sentences. Two-thirds of people with life sentences (66.4%) are nonwhite, reaching as high as 83.7% of the life sentenced population in the state of New York.

 There are 6,807 juveniles serving life sentences; 1,755, or 25.8%, of whom are serving sentences of life without parole.

Seventy-seven percent of juveniles sentenced to life are youth of color.

There are 4,694 women and girls serving life sentences, 28.4% of females sentenced to life do not have the possibility of parole.

Categories: Aging Behind Bars · death / end of life care and choices · disability rights · health care · legal issues · mental health care · prisons / criminal justice
Tagged: , , , , , ,