On the outside, they’d be admitted to a hospital ER for some acute condition, then funneled to a county run nursing home or one in the hospitals’ network that needed bodies badly enough to accept a Medicaid patient. If the patient were male, that might be far away from family as no facility wants to be stuck with a male Medicaid patient.
If the patient were older, they would do a little better as the initial Medicare reimbursements are higher.
I'm curious, can you elaborate as to why that is?
Nursing homes are an awful, evil business.
> It’s one of the lowest paid jobs available, making just 15 to 32 cents an hour.
So.. The UK is an OECD country. I think this does happen, albiet at a lower intensity than in the USA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_of_Abdelbaset_al-Megra...
Calling that controversial decision would be an understatement.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. What strikes me as an act of unspeakable cruelty is that people who have been in prison (felon) are no longer allowed to vote, and get the ability to work but below any kind of minimum wage. As soon as we start to treat people as non-human we enter a slippery slope (see Stanford prison experiment).
The only exception I am willing to make to that is people who are insane. But those end up in involuntary commitment.
And even those 2 examples I mentioned are also just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much wrong with our prison system (especially in USA). I did enjoy the series Orange Is The New Black because it highlighted some examples.
I'll be honest, I don't know enough about the topic to really answer this. Some quick Googling suggest that this is what happens, though. According to this page, [0] many states restore your voting rights automatically after your sentence is completed, and some very liberal ones even allow for voting in prison (which in my opinion is really stupid).
> Don't you think rehabilitation means that a person fully integrates within society, including the benefits that provides?
I don't think that rehabilitation happens instantly, so it makes sense that voting rights be restored after a period of years. Felons need to prove that they can live in the real world again before they can vote to change it.
0: https://www.nonprofitvote.org/voting-in-your-state/special-c...
Compassion like yours is for the lucky.
Fortunately, the justice system is not concerned with how you feel about it either. It should assess prisoners purely on their current state and their current danger to society, not on how their victims feel 31 years later(and that should work both ways - someone shouldn't be kept in prison because their victim feels that way, but they also shouldn't be released early because their victim feels compassionate - justice should be blind to both of those).
Conversely, does everyone in those circumstances grow up to be a violent offender?
Yes. No matter what your background is, doing horrible things to others is still a choice.
But as someone not born in the US (although I live here), the existence of a prison hospice with any great number of patients strikes me as an act of unspeakable cruelty. Someone in end-stage palliative care is no risk to society or their victims. The vast majority of those there ought be subject to a compassionate release so they can die with dignity in the care of their family. I cannot fathom that any OECD country besides America would ever have a system like this.