NEWS VOICES
Welcome to News Voices, a weekly feature where members of the WVIA News team will talk with each other — and sometimes sources — about key things we've learned in recent stories we have been working on.
Today, WVIA News' Roger DuPuis and Lydia McFarlane talk about SCI Waymart's program that trains inmates to care for fellow inmates in hospice care. This is a transcript of their conversation as it aired on WVIA Radio.
***
ROGER: You're listening to Morning Edition here on WVIA Radio. I'm Roger DuPuis, and this is News Voices. Today I'm here with WVIA News reporter Lydia McFarlane, who recently did a report on SCI Waymart, where they are training inmates to care for fellow inmates who are in hospice care. So, tell me in a nutshell what the program is and what they do.
LYDIA: So at SCI Waymart, their healthcare staff trains inmates — and SCI Waymart has a relatively old population compared to other state prisons in the Commonwealth — so they need help caring for the older inmates, especially the ones that are in hospice, that are bedridden. So they started to train inmates to assist the nursing staff and assist the healthcare staff in taking care of their peers who are in hospice.
ROGER: The average age of a Waymart inmate is 45 and a half years old, according to the superintendent, but about 36% of those inmates are over the age of 50, and 10% are over 65.
LYDIA: Right. So while researching this story, I came across this statistic from the American Journal of Public Health, that 55 is actually considered geriatric in prison because of the difficult conditions that your body is in in that environment. So I thought it was interesting that they included that the 36% of inmates at Waymart are older than 50 and that's because some of those inmates can be considered geriatric.
ROGER: And this is not unique to Waymart, I understand?
LYDIA: No. The inmate population, the incarcerated population nationwide, is rapidly aging. This is because there are a lot of people serving life sentences from the '70s and '80s, during that age of mass incarceration from the war on drugs.
ROGER: So, how do inmates in the prison become eligible to participate?
LYDIA: Yeah, so eligibility, you need to be on your best behavior to be eligible to join this program. So that means nothing on your record for the past two years. So you need to have good behavior. And they really want folks who are passionate about this work and really want to help out in the prison community. So it is a volunteer position. It's not paid unless they are working shifts where they are sitting with actively dying inmates. But besides that, the regular day-to-day of just helping these inmates with eating, changing, going to the bathroom, that's all volunteer work, and they really want to attract people who are in it for good and not for money.
ROGER: One of the things that I know you stressed in your story, that came across to me loud and clear, was that dying with dignity is so important to all of us, really, but especially to folks who are inside the prison.
LYDIA: Something that struck me was that the staff of the prison said repeatedly to me that we are not the judges. The judge already came down with their ruling, and we're not here to judge these inmates. The superintendent said, we're here to rehabilitate them. We're here to give them opportunities to become better people, and not necessarily punish them, but to help rehabilitate them. Their punishment is being here. So we want to give them opportunities to better themselves.
ROGER: Right. And one of the folks that you talked to said he wants the inmates to understand that you have to brace yourself to hear some difficult things when you're participating in this program.
LYDIA: Yeah, so that particular inmate, he told me that sitting with some of these inmates that are dying, you hear things that you know it might not necessarily be a confession about the crime they committed, but just trying to clear their conscience about the wrongs that they've done in their life, and maybe it is a confession about something that they did to land themselves behind bars. So he just said, it's really important to have an open mind. And what struck me from my conversation with him was that, you know, he told me that all of them as inmates, they know what they did wrong, they know why they're behind bars and no one's going to make them feel as guilty as they already do themselves. So he just stressed the importance of being open-minded and not judging a fellow inmate for the crime they might have committed, or some of the things they might be wanting to get off their chests at the end of their lives.
ROGER: One of the things I want to close on is that you talked about how the hospice unit really looked like a nursing home.
LYDIA: If I didn't have the context of having gone through the security and gone through the prison, just seeing the beds and the older inmates that were bedridden, it really did look like a nursing home.
ROGER: Lydia, thanks for being here today.
READ MORE ABOUT THE HOSPICE PROGRAM: SCI Waymart meets needs of aging incarcerated population by training inmates in hospice care
