Life Sentences and Death

collage

clipped from: lens.blogs.nytimes.com
Lens - Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism
October 17, 2009 , 1:14 pm

On Assignment: Life Sentences

In the Rooms series for The Times, Fred R. Conrad has produced elegant images and sweeping 360-degree panoramas.
More recently, he faced the challenge of photographing the hospital wing of the Coxsackie Correctional Facility, one of New Yorks maximum-security prisons. The article it illustrates, Fellow Inmates Ease the Pain of Dying in Jail, and Find a Kinship focuses on prison hospices and on the incarcerated volunteers who serve dying patients.
The experience is being with them during their final days — it changes you, Mr. Conrad said. I wanted to see the effect on men who had done awful things in the past. Was there a chance of redemption?

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dying-in-prison
Two Comments

I.
1. October 17, 2009 1:45 pm Link

Life imprisonment is a terribly costly and terribly punitive to the more just and humane traditional alternative of execution for those convicted of capital crimes. The public has been brainwashed with the false claim that it is more expensive to use the death penalty than to imprison murderers for life. This is hard to believe. Most of the costs related to the death penalty are legal costs related to appeals. That process could be streamlined to reduce some of the costs.

For many of those prisoners who have been convicted of capital crimes where sentences of 20, 25 or 30 years to life, I am sure many would prefer the liberation of execution to a life of being caged like a vicious wild animal (which many actually are) LetsBfairUSA

II.
2. October 17, 2009 2:10 pm Link

An amazing piece of work that depicts humanity, love, and vulnerability, where most of us probably dont want to find it.
ed Bradford