New Illinois State Law Requires Prisons to Submit Annual Hospice Reports
by Michael Thompson
American prison populations are aging rapidly while studies have continued to show that prisoners have significantly lower life expectancies than those outside of prisons. In Illinois, some 23% of state prisoners are over the age of 50. That is a huge jump from just 4% in 1988, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Importantly, more than 1,000 Illinois prisoners are over the age of 65. As more prisoners age past their life expectancies, how prisons deal with end-of-life care becomes a critical concern.
The Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) does not have a formalized hospice and palliative care system. As a result, how end-of-life care takes place can vary significantly from prison to prison. The DOC nevertheless has a policy that provides for “safe, dignified and comfortable dying, self-determined life closure and effective grieving.” Often, palliative care is provided by aides pulled from the general prison population. The prisons, however, do not maintain a centralized data repository on which prisoners are assigned as aides, or even the number of prisoner aides. Neither have the prisons maintained a centralized or consistent system for tracking patient outcomes, such as how long the patient survived under hospice and palliative care, how they died, or whether there were any care-related grievances.
The Illinois state legislature has attempted to address these issues by modifying the state’s Unified Code of Corrections. The new act is known as the Eddie Thomas Act (HB2397), after a prisoner who died alone in his cell. Eddie had been diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer just five months earlier but received no end-of-life care and support. Legislators hope to improve care by mandating metrics regarding prisoner deaths and hospice and palliative care. In order to protect the privacy of patients receiving end-of-life care, the data reported will be anonymized.
The primary information requested is aggregated along dimensions such as race, ethnicity, age, illness, length of sentence, causes of all deaths in the prison system, and people who were otherwise removed from palliative and hospice care and why. Legislators are also demanding that DOC provide the names of specific units that provide palliative and hospice care, the criteria for eligibility, services provided, staffing, and types and counts of volunteers.
As state Rep. Nicole Grasse (D-Arlington Heights) told local news media, “the reason for this data collection is to really have an understanding of what is provided, who does it and how we can help with that.” But not everyone agrees with Grasse that the new law will improve care and strengthen program integrity oversight. State Rep. Brad Holbrook (R-Shelbyville) is dismissive and prefers the ad hoc system already in place. “Maybe it’s a worthy goal and maybe it’s not,” he told local news. “I just think it’s duplicative. I think it will add additional costs and will lead to additional burdens to the department.”
Additional source: Hospice News
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