Providing Hospice Care for Our Fellow Inmates Helps us All
For more than three years, offenders in Potosi Correctional Center’s Hospice
program have helped our terminally ill brothers spend their last days as
comfortably as possible.
The Hospice program provides palliative care, which is designed to ease the
many discomforts of terminal illness. It is not meant to cure a terminally
ill person, but to allow him to accept his condition and maintain a higher
quality of life to the final end.
This program is a combined effort of prison administrators, medical staff,
and offender volunteers. Several of us Death Row inmates are fortunate to
be able to participate in this program as patient caregivers.
It is our desire to meet a growing need within our correctional facilities
for this type of care.
Hospice is not a puppet-on-a-string program, manipulated by staff. We are
a group of dedicated men whose sole purpose is helping our fallen and dying
brothers, regardless of race, color or creed.
Our goal is to provide each and every patient the well-deserved right to
die with as much dignity as possible.
Hospice includes ongoing training for volunteers, who attend monthly group
meetings. We learn about the dying process and how to care for our patients.
Volunteers from the outside help us be more productive and efficient in patient
care.
The survival and success of the Hospice program depends upon inmate participation
and efforts. We make daily visits with the patient, solely for the purpose
to cater to his needs. Giving the patients their spirit back, we sit with
them, pray with them, smile and cheer them up however we can. We clean their
rooms, write or read letters for them.
Active Hospice volunteers are men from different cultures, backgrounds and
religious beliefs. We all bond together for the good, with one goal – that
no one deserves to leave this world alone.
Our work has many rewards and builds our self-esteem. Every visit with a
patient, in each and every smile of appreciation, there is acknowledgement
of our presence, and the knowledge that what we do does, indeed, make a difference.
To look into a dying man’s eyes and hear his last heartfelt words of “I love
you. Thank you,” is worth more than gold.
The impact Hospice has on all involved – patient, volunteer, prison population
and staff – clears all the hurdles of the prison lifestyle.
The Hospice program restores humanity to an environment that seldom reflects
or is identified with, compassion toward our fellow man.
The prison environment portrays itself as self-serving and full of animosity
and hate. The results of the Hospice program show that there is no better
way to extinguish that stereotype or hate but by giving.
It is the hope of Hospice members that the expansion of this program will
soon reach each and every prison in this state as well as others. We also
hope that the program will be expanded to meet the needs of chronically ill
offenders as well.
By Dennis Skillicorn, Missouri Death Row Inmate
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"The Eyes Of The World Are Watching Now"
This page was
last updated February 24, 2003
Canadian Coalition Against the Death
Penalty
This page is maintained and updated by Dave
Parkinson and Tracy Lamourie in Toronto, Canada