Rhode Island prisoners the parole board has judged no danger to the public are dying in the prison infirmary because nursing homes reject them once they learn of a criminal record — at greater cost to taxpayers than community care.
Every state but Hawaii keeps a compassionate release law on the books — a promise, at least on paper, that a prisoner who is terminally ill, severely ill, or too old and infirm to pose any threat to anyone can be let out to die in a hospital, a hospice, or a family home rather than in a cell. Rhode Island keeps two such promises: a medical parole statute and, since July 6, 2021, a geriatric parole pathway added by the General Assembly to deal with an aging prison population and the exorbitant cost of caring for it. What a fresh batch of data and one uncomfortable peer-reviewed study make plain is that the promise, here and almost everywhere else, is largely theoretical.
The Prison Policy Initiative on July 22 published its most current state-by-state accounting of how often medical parole is actually granted, drawing on public records from 47 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal system. The picture is one of near-total disuse, and no upward trend to speak of. Florida granted conditional medical release to 45 people in 2019 and 18 in fiscal 2025; Massachusetts, which released 31 in the first COVID year of 2020, granted just 11 in fiscal 2024; New Jersey managed eight over five recent years. In the federal courts, 2,795 motions for compassionate release were filed in fiscal 2025 and 394 — 14 percent — were granted. The mechanism, the analysis concludes, sets an extremely high bar behind a lengthy and confusing process, so that most applicants stay locked up and many die before their cases are ever resolved…