I highly recommend today's New York Times article, "Life, With Dementia," to everyone who is interested in prison reform, care ethics, social change, community-building, mental illness... Well, really, I recommend this article to everyone. A brief highlight:
"“A year ago,” Mr. Baxter said, “I couldn’t have said, ‘You know what man, I’m going to go help this grown man get in the shower,’ ” and “get in there and help these guys wash theirself off.”
"Gold Coats say they are moved by the work. “I’m a person who was broken,” said Mr. Burdick, who during 35 years in prison lost a wife to AIDS and a 16-year-old daughter to suicide. Dementia patients often “don’t even say thank you,” he said, but “they just pat me like that and I know what that means.”
"Mr. Cañas said: “I didn’t have any feelings about other people. I mean, in that way, I was a predator.” Now, he said, “I’m a protector.”"
This is the kind of reform we need in prisons: Empowering prisoners to help each other, and themselves, rather than feeding the cycle of violence that spins out of control when people have no real stake in their own future, or in the well-being of others.
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