“The worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it.”
Oscar Wilde
Is Humane Prison Hospice Project doing important work? Yes. Are they creating radical change? No.
If we believe dying well is a human right, then implementing it is not a radical concept. A radical concept would be challenging the very structure that tolerated people being denied this basic human right in the first place. Humane was created with good intentions. However, due to their positionally at an intersection of the Prison Industrial Complex and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, they have to be constantly battling against becoming another piece of the system that perpetuates the harms they were "created" to address. The way to do this is to work for reform through an abolitionist framework. To treat root causes, to imagine different realities of harm reduction, to give power back to the communities which are affected by the system, and to hold the belief throughout it all that the prison system is not something that can be fixed, but rather is inherently wrong. Humane fails to do this when they focus only on a singular reform program, which they want to implement "at all costs". These costs include cooperating with the state out of fear, not giving power or opportunity to affected communities, and ultimately operating from the belief that prisons should exist.
This type of reform, "reformist reform", no matter how well-intentioned, will ultimately prolong the structure and existence of prisons.
Humane prisons are still prisons.