Lesley A Sharp

Chronic, terminal illnesses and the graying of America’s prisons characterize a growing health crisis in carceral America, especially for men, who comprise 90% of the nation’s 1.9 million incarcerated. Widespread failure of compassionate medical release imposes unanticipated death sentences on men for whom dying alone and abandoned is a legitimate fear. Approximately 70 institutions house hospices staffed by trained inmate volunteers who offer compassionate care and companionship to dying inmates. Hospice on the Outside strives to facilitate a “good death”; other premises inform prison hospice: no one—regardless of crime—should die alone and abandoned; and, purportedly, empathic deathcare transforms volunteers by subverting hyper-masculinity and criminal incorrigibility. Several deficits characterize established scholarship: a focus on in-prison experience, but not on how hospice work informs subjectivity post-release; a paucity of comparative studies across institutions; sparse data on how supervisors’ professions shape the ethos of prison hospice; how care work in other domains might inform hospice experience; and limited anthropological engagement. This multi-year, ethnographic project addresses these deficits. Hospice defines the primary concern of this project; nevertheless, comparative data from other domains define a subset of this project, because palliative work, alongside prison-based interspecies (canine and equine) care programs, promote a similar logics of reformed masculinity. Archival research, onsite visits to carceral institutions and programs, and interviews with 20+ formerly incarcerated men and 10+ supervisory staff will direct efforts to answer the following core questions: What are the longterm, subjectively understood consequences of deathcare for formerly incarcerated men? How might men’s engagement with still other forms of carework—including palliative care training and interspecies work—shape their subjective understandings of the carceral logics of “reform” and “transformation”?