In Oregon’s Prisons, Terminally Ill People Are Left with Little Recourse

This story is the latest in an ongoing series on state-level parole systems and America’s aging prisons. Read our prior installments on New York and California.

One of the first things they saw when they walked into the prison was the wheelchairs. 

One after another, something like 40 chairs and walkers were lined up neatly outside each cell, stretching away into the distance. It was a jarring sight even for Kyle Hedquist, who’d worked for many years as a hospice volunteer during the decades he spent locked up there. 

Hedquist never thought he’d get out of prison. When his sentence was commuted in mid-2022, he certainly didn’t expect to be back so soon. But in mid-January, he found himself on the Oregon State Penitentiary’s E Block, this time accompanied by high-ranking prison officials and a dozen state lawmakers—all staring at this endless line of equipment for prisoners who were too elderly or sick or disabled to walk on their own. 

It was a powerful testament to an uncomfortable truth about America’s prisons: Increasingly, they contain elderly people, who are serving life or many decades for crimes that were adjudicated in the wake of the United States’s turn towards harsh sentencing schemes like mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws. Many of these people will die inside-–despite the fact that nearly every state possesses some form of compassionate release program that could allow terminally ill prisoners to spend their final days at home.

Oregon has a higher percentage of aging prisoners than most states. Hedquist was there that day to show legislators the prison infirmary where he had worked, in hope that they might support legislation, Senate Bill 520, that would overhaul the state’s compassionate release system. Hedquist was hired after his release as a policy and outreach associate by the Oregon Justice Resource Center, an advocacy organization that has been trying to improve the compassionate release process in Oregon for years.

Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national organization that supports criminal justice reforms, has been researching the issue for almost two decades, discovering that in almost every case, compassionate release is more of an idea than a reality. Last year, the organization released a report grading each state’s compassionate release system. Amidst generally poor results, Oregon failed in every category that FAMM used to measure systems—scoring higher than only five states, including two that had no compassionate release programs at all at the time. “It’s kind of a bare bones system,” said Daniel Landsman, FAMM’s deputy director of state policy. “It just falters in every category.” 

According to data FAMM obtained from the state’s department of corrections, only seven out of 47 applicants won compassionate release in Oregon in 2019, while six people who had applied died before their cases could be processed. In 2020, no one who applied got out via compassionate release. 

“We would say that those low numbers don&