I drove the four and a half hours to Rome, New York, the night before I was scheduled to visit the prison hospice program at Mohawk. The desk clerk at the Quality Inn gave me directions the next morning. “You can’t miss it,” she said in a raspy voice. Mohawk had once been a residential home for the developmentally disabled. It occupied the southernmost corner of the 150-acre Mohawk-Oneida campus and was converted to a medium-security prison in 1988. Today, it houses about 1,400 inmates, 112 of whom are inside the “skilled nursing facility,” Walsh Regional Medical Unit, which takes in prisoners from the central and western parts of New York State.
What the hospice program at Mohawk did was prevent patients from dying alone. Terminal patients, particularly those dying inside prison, need human contact, companionship, and a chance to talk about their lives, the nurses told me. The program also provided healthy prisoners who had good behavior records the chance to train as volunteers, to give back to their fellow inmates. The program provided a real “sense of satisfaction to our guys,” according to the daytime hospice nurse. “They’re proud of what they’re doing. They’re putting someone ahead of themselves. They’ve put themselves first until now.” Volunteer training took place once a year (and lasted one week), but applications came in throughout the year.
[For more of this story, written by Ann Neumann, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...re-in-prison/462660/]
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