Danielle Levy

The Receiver in charge of California’s troubled prison system has identified 32 prisoners who would not pose any danger to society were they to be released. Ten of those are paralyzed either totally or partially. Given California’s budget shortfall of $26.6 billion several political factions have an incentive to work with the Receiver simply because of the cost savings of releasing these prisoners. Their health care cost would then shift to their families, not the state. In addition the cost of security in itself amounts to several millions. These inmates, several in hospitals, are chained to their beds and guarded 24×7 at taxpayers’ expenses. Pictures of ankles chained to beds have made it to newspapers and other media. The decision is now on Governor Brown’s desk. He can pardon these inmates, lessen their sentence or find some other way to release them.
The budget issue is real and is important, but there is another issue just as real and just as important, that of chaining a paralyzed person to a bed—as if their paralysis were not already a form of chain. Prisoners or not, this kind of treatment is unnecessary and inhumane. It reflects far more on our lack of compassion than on whatever their crimes may have been.

In Asia, it used to be that 24-karat gold was the sign for having made it. Then came having a mobile phone. Singapore entrepreneur Jack Sim hopes that having a toilet will be next. He doesn’t think non-profit organizations which he says have to spend half their time fundraising and the other half writing reports, are up to the task of solving the hygiene problems he’s trying to address. An estimated 1.2 billion people worldwide, according to UNICEF, defecate in the open due to a lack of toilet facilities of any kind. Sim is beginning his campaign in Cambodia where every year 11,000 people die of diarrhea linked to open defecation, a figure that is more than the combined deaths from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Why not, he believes, tap into people’s dreams rather than their fears? “If you tell someone they may die of diarrhea, it is not much of an incentive to build a toilet. But if toilets become a sign of wealth, jealousy over the neighbors’ latrines will drive them to build their own,” Sim says. “…if people can buy 20 million hand phones in India, they can buy 20 million toilets.”
Sometimes,it takes an entrepreneur…

For most of us death is not an easy subject and when it is related to a diagnosis of terminal illness, it is even more so. Patients don’t want to hear that they’re dying, and doctors either don’t know how or don’t want to tell them they are. The issues surrounding death and dying have been inadequately addressed for generations and decades ago Elizabeth Kubler-Ross became famous for trying to remedy their long-time neglect. Now the American Society of Clinical Oncology has issued a booklet giving guidance on how physicians can discuss with patients the choices before them, such as comfort care, or the fact that further chemo has become futile. The booklet’s ideas are beginning to be used, for example in a program called Closure. Created by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, it teaches families how to talk to each other and with their doctors about what they want or don’t in their final days. It has been so successful that although it started in one hospital in Pittsburgh it has spread to several.
Because death and dying are the subject of so many of ours fears and misunderstandings, any effort that weakens them needs to be both hailed and heeded.