Hospice in Prisons

Signature Grand, Davie, Florida, USA

Objective. Prison health care personnel should advocate for prison hospice services. Background. The inmate population in the United States is growing increasingly older. The Bureau of Justice Statistics for corrections underscores the demographic change of prisoners’ age. Of the 1.3 million prisoners in the country, 113,358 were over the age of fifty. This represents approximately a 300% increase from the 33,499 recorded in 1990. Thus older inmates now represent 8.7% of the entire population, up from 3.3% just a decade ago. This trend will escalate for a variety of reasons. Methods/Results. In the face of more and older inmates the challenges to providing correctional health care will get increasingly more difficult and costly. Older sicker inmates present many more chronic and terminal health problems. As prisoners become older and sicker with more chronic and terminal diseases, death in prison will become more common than it is today. Preemptively encountering this situation rather than reactively responding is a better path for most systems. Indeed, it is likely that the courts will eventually look at this issue as it becomes more frequent. Conclusions. Prison health care personnel and prison administrators should consider the hospice concept for their inmates for a variety of reasons. Acknowledgement. This presentation is from a chapter in Volume 2 of the book, Managing Special Populations in Jails and Prisons written by the author and is a review and advocacy for hospice services in a variety of unique ways for prisons. Volume One was published in 2005 and this current volume with this chapter is due to be published in 2008.