Editor’s note: Inmates' faces and names are concealed in the following story, as per Pennsylvania Department of Corrections guidelines.
An inmate who will spend the rest of his life incarcerated at SCI Waymart wanted to give more meaning to his life behind bars.
He’s in prison for a crime he committed as a teenager. Now in his 30s, he’s reckoning with spending the rest of his life in the facility.
The inmate signed up for the prison’s hospice program, allowing him to help other inmates at the end of their lives.
He knows he’ll die in prison and sees himself in the inmates he wants to comfort and support.
“I'm a lifer, so it's a little bit more personal to me that I would want somebody to sit with me if it was reversed,” he said.
SCI Waymart trains inmates to care for fellow inmates in hospice care. Four inmates will make the move to hospice soon, with more expected this summer, said Shari Dulski, SCI Waymart’s correctional healthcare administrator.
A NEPA example of the country’s aging incarcerated population
Nurses and their inmate aides care for hospice patients. Some are bedridden, needing help with eating, changing and using the bathroom.
The patients have recently signed do-not-resuscitate (DNR) forms. Some have just a few more months to live.
The medium security prison's hospice unit looks like a nursing home.
SCI Waymart is one of two prisons, along with SCI Laurel Highlands, in the Commonwealth that has a personal care unit. Waymart receives medical transfers from institutions across the state, making its population older than most of Pennsylvania’s state prisons.
The average age of a Waymart inmate is 45.5, according to SCI Waymart’s superintendent, Mark Wahl. About 36% of inmates are over the age of 50, and 10% are over 65 out of a total of 1,122 as of April of this year, he said.
Wahl said SCI Waymart averages one death per month.
Waymart's aging population is not unique. The incarcerated population is growing older nationwide.
Incarceration causes accelerated biological aging because of the environmental factors in prisons, according to research from the Journal of Gerontological Nursing. The American Journal of Public Health considers 55 years old geriatric in prison.
Older adults make up five times as much of the prison population now than 30 years ago, according to data analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative from the Department of Justice.
This is credited to the age of mass incarceration in the 1970s and 80s during the War on Drugs. Many people dying in jail are serving life sentences from decades ago.
Inmate eligibility for hospice care training
Being a part of the hospice program is a reward for good behavior.
“They can't have any misconducts within the past two years,” said Dulski. “They have to be cleared by security. They have to be cleared by their unit management team and then by our deputies and superintendent to get approval to be placed into the program. If they have violent crimes, they're going to be disqualified from that.”
The training takes 40 hours. Seventeen inmates are currently certified.
Administrators want to attract applicants who are serious about the work, so being a hospice aide is a volunteer position. Inmates are only paid for their hospice work when they tend to actively dying patients.
Dying with dignity while behind bars
Clara Spangenberg, a registered nurse at SCI Waymart, trains inmates for the hospice program. She highlights the importance of death with dignity during the trainings.
“We talk a lot about pain management with them, preserving the dignity, so that way they're letting them be who they want to be, not always how they want, because you can't always in jail die how you want,” Spangenberg said. “But in a way that we can make happen.”
Wahl said there’s a misconception that prisons are for punishment. He wants people to know about Waymart’s positive programs, like his hospice-trained inmates.
“Our job is not to punish,” Wahl said. “The judge is the one who punishes. Our job is rehabilitation, firm, fair, consistent attitudes and behavior towards the inmates. I'm all about rehabilitation.”
“Just because we're in prison and we have inmates in prison, doesn't mean that there's not humanity in place as well,” he continued.
Another certified inmate pursued the training as a means of self-improvement. He feels that he's making a difference.
“I don't want to die in jail,” the inmate said. “But if I did, I would hope it would be like this. This place, even though it's a jail, it is special, and they do care.”
He wants other interested inmates to brace themselves to hear some difficult things while caring for inmates in hospice. He thinks many people he’s sat with wanted to die with a clear conscience.
“If you don't have an open mind, don't waste your time, because the last thing somebody needs before they pass is for somebody to give them a guilt trip or make them feel bad,” he said. “Most people that are in jail, you couldn't make them feel worse than they already feel.”
He recently completed his sentence of five years. He’s on a medical hold because of a hip injury, but he can leave at any time. While he joked that he never wants to come back to jail, he’s grateful for the opportunities he had to grow at SCI Waymart.
“When I talk to my family, I tell them that I'm not upset that I'm in jail,” he said. “At one time, I probably was, but I'm not upset anymore, because I've known that I've had an opportunity to just do so much good while I was here, and not everybody gets that chance to do that.”
Finding purpose while serving a life sentence
The certified inmate serving a life sentence knows he’ll need the kindness of younger inmates one day. The program helped him change his outlook on life in prison. He’s been at Waymart for the past three years after being admitted for a mental health crisis.
He requested to stay so he could take advantage of the many programs SCI Waymart offered after he recovered. His positive efforts helped him gain responsibilities, like being a dog handler for one of the prison's service dogs.
“Within a year of my being in the facility, I had a dog,” he said. “The following year, they offered CPS (certified peer support) training. I did that, and then, almost to the day the following year, we had the hospice training. Every year I've been here, there's been something else that has been afforded.”
CPS inmates like him offer support to hospice-trained inmates when a patient dies. They help them process the death since many inmates become close with the hospice patients they care for.
SCI Waymart also holds religious ceremonies on the units where the deceased inmates lived.
Preparing for life after prison
The inmate approaching release said he learned to be OK with death from his involvement in the program. He said he's grown into a version of himself he and his children can be proud of.
“It's definitely helped me as a person, because I feel like when I came to jail, I was not that. I was immature,” he said.
He credits the program with his newfound compassion and open-mindedness and hopes to put them to use as he starts his new life outside of prison.
“There's so much more out there in the world, and there's so many people that need help, and there's so many people who have it worse than you. That's been the biggest lesson that I've learned, and that is just to help others,” he said.
