Inked in tattoos from neck to knuckle, Kevion Lyman rose from his bunk at dawn, pulled scrubs over his skinny frame, stepped out of his cell and set out for work. The 27-year-old strolled down the long central hallway connecting the different wings of the prison, past the dining hall, the solitary-confinement unit for violent offenders and the psych ward. Pushing open the big steel doors, he reported for his morning shift in the hospice.
Great efforts have been made to differentiate the hospice from the rest of the prison: The windows have white shutters, root-beer floats are occasionally served, the walls are plastered in artwork and a plastic tree, left over from Christmas with green-and-red tinsel looping through its branches, lights up the entrance. These attempts to add cheer go only so far, of course. Shutters open onto iron bars. Correctional officers escort nurses as they make rounds with a medication cart. Inmate workers are frisked at the start and the end of their shifts. And until recently, the only outdoor space available to patients was a small chain-link-fenced patio nicknamed “the dog run.” The California Medical Facility, a medium-security prison in Vacaville, midway between San Francisco and Sacramento, is home to 2,400 men — some young and healthy, others disabled and sick, and then those in the hospice, who are dying.
Later that January morning, Lyman and two co-workers, Fernando Murillo and Kao Saephanh, smoothed clean sheets and a red, flowery quilt onto an empty bed. They were ushering in their newest patient: a lanky man clad in a navy jumpsuit named Jimmy Figueroa. Finding a spot on the edge of his new mattress, Figueroa held a carton of fortified milk, appearing dazed as he slurped on a straw through the large gap where his teeth had once been. With a deep tan, a full head of silvery-black hair elegantly parted in the middle and knockoff Ray-Ban sunglasses, he looked, as one of the men observed, like an Italian hit man in a movie.
Murillo got down on one knee on the linoleum floor so that he was at eye level with the patient. He put tan socks on Figueroa’s feet, which dangled off the side of the bed, and gave them a squeeze. “We’re here for you — anything you need. Now, it’s time to get some rest.”
The hospice at the California Medical Facility is one of the nation’s first and the only licensed hospice unit inside a California prison.