"I changed who I am by just doing the program. Being so close to life and death...I'm not the same person. Now, I'm a caregiver. I'm still a prideful person - don't get it twisted. I still take a stand, but now I try to learn about things before I take a stand...that's changed." Paco, prisoner and hospice volunteer, Maine State Prison.
Wednesday, I attended an all day conference at the Maine State Prison about how to deal with the aging and terminally ill prison population - no small feat.
That's because disproportionate sentencing policies, ‘tough on crime’ attitudes, and the failed 'war on drugs" have turned our prisons into locked-down nursing homes, with taxpayers footing the bill.
According to our ACLU report, “At America’s Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly,” by 2030, there will be more than 400,000 elderly prisoners behind bars, a 4,400 percent increase from 1981 when only 8,853 state and federal prisoners were elderly.
And elderly prisoners are twice as expensive to incarcerate as the average prisoner and pose little danger to society.
So here we are - prison systems across the country caring for a population that poses little risk to public safety, creates unique challenges, and requires massive resources. Is this what we intended when we created our "justice" system? Is this where we should be directing our scarce corrections dollars?
As one speaker discussed, how do you help someone with dementia or incontinence in a prison setting? Imagine how difficult that is "in the free world", nevermind behind bars.
So while the real solutions are sentence reform, alternatives to incarceration like compassionate early release, and a full scale re-evaluation of the purpose of "corrections", in the shorter term, prison administrators have gotten creative about where to look for help - and one of those is to the prisoners themselves.
In an era of tight budgets, volunteer hospice programs provide free human resources to help prison medical staff and officers cope with the exploding number of aging and chronically ill inmates.
What they may not have anticipated, however, is the dramatic impact on the volunteers themselves. Hospice programs provide a rare opportunity for prisoner volunteers to connect with and care for other human beings in ways that can be transformative.
My hope is that programs like this, and the crisis of those elderly and dying in prison will create an opening for a more rational, merciful, compassionate approach to criminal justice in our country.
Everyone knows by now, the U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's prison population.
Now the question is - what are we going to do about it?
For more, check out this moving ACLU video on the topic and get involved.