NEWS

April 26, 2010
Prison Hospice Helps Inmates and Care-Givers

Inside prison walls, Gary Rubenstein is facing a death sentence, but one not imposed by a judge or jury. He has terminal lung cancer and has stopped treatment, saving the state expensive end-of-life medical care in a futile attempt to keep him alive. “I said, ‘For what? I’m in prison,’” said Rubenstein. “There’s really no light at the end of my tunnel.” Story reported by KTVU.

Rubenstein has spent almost half his 53 years in prison and 16 years served so far this time for his third strike, a conviction for attempted strong arm robbery.

The talented pen-and-ink/tattoo artist is spending his last California Medical Facility in Vacaville days in prison at the end of Vacaville’s X-corridor in a hospice, the nation’s first.

“It sounded like a good place to be,” said Rubenstein.

With an aging prison population and more than 350 inmates dying in California’s prisons each year, there’s always an inmate wanting one of the 17 beds. Here, other prisoners volunteer to care for them and promise they will not die alone and will die with dignity, with as little pain as possible.

But one question hospice officials are often asked: Why should criminals get compassion when they didn’t give it to their victims?

“We have an inmate who’s a ward of the state,” said Rev. Keith Knauf. “We can’t be like the murderer. We can’t be like the rapist or the child molester. We have to treat each one like a human being and these people who have done these things are broken.”

The California Medical Facility in Vacaville, where Rubenstein lives and Knauf works, was the first licensed hospice in any prison anywhere in the world and that was back in 1996.

But the caring for those in their last days started much earlier, with hospice pioneer and psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and a Berkeley couple Robert and Nancy Alexander during the aids epidemic in the mid-80’s.

So many inmates volunteer to be caregivers here, the rejection rate for applicants is higher than for elite colleges about 40 to 1.

“We have a lot of applicants that want to be in the program, some with good motives, some with bad motives,” said Knauf.

The chaplain says he looks for prisoners with compassion in their hearts, even if they don’t know it yet. Inmates like Sean Reece, who’s been behind bars 13 years.

“One guy told me, ‘You know when they pass away we help put them in the bag, the body bag’ and I said, ‘Time out, hold on, wait a minute, put ‘em in the what?’” said Reece. “That’s up close and personal with something I myself had a problem with, death.”

But Reece persevered. He and others picked for the program start training by viewing 50 videos, then moved to one-on-one care-giving, cleaning bed pans, washing patients, holding their hands and those hardened hearts begin to soften.

“Oh, I don’t trust anybody but these guys are different because they’re sick,” said Reece.

He figures it was divine guidance that brought him here.

“I was put here for a reason, I don’t know why, I’m going to stay and find out,” said Reece. “Because I think the more you deal with death the more you understand life.”

Roman Galafate has spent 21 years here for killing a man. The former army medic said he regrets it every time he helps someone die.

“I hurts, it hurts, it’s like I relive a crime, I relive it each time I watch them take their last breath,” said Galafate.

With six years as a caregiver, he’s relived it many times, having seen an estimated 100 deaths. But he and the other inmates say helping other people die changes the way they live.

“In that sense, a prison hospice is not a place of death but a place of healing and closure,” said Knauf.

The final closure comes when the caregiver washes the dead inmate’s body, including the ink from the required postmortem fingerprinting, and zips the body bag.

“We have a form we fill out when somebody passes,” said Reece. “On everybody’s form I write may the creator see this man’s heart was good and judge him accordingly. That’s what it’s all about.”

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