Grace Before Dying

Photographs by Lori Waselchuk
Louisiana has some of the toughest prison laws in the nation, where one of every 55 residents is behind bars—many of them for life. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility in Angola, some 85 percent of the 5,100 inmates are expected to die in incarceration. Until recently, that was a lonely process: prisoners were buried in shabby boxes in numbered graves. But in 1998, Angola prison created a hospice program that officials say has been transformative. Now, when a terminally ill patient is too sick to live among the general population, he is transferred to the hospice ward. There, inmate volunteers, most of them serving life sentences themselves, care for him—going to great lengths to ensure that he has company during his final moments. When he dies, hospice volunteers plan a memorial service and burial. They build a casket by hand. They take that casket to the prison cemetery in a handcrafted hearse, followed by a procession of friends and family. This dignified process was captured by photographer Lori Waselchuk in her two-year project Grace Before Dying. The following is a selection of her work: