The Humane Prison Hospice Project stemmed from a belief that dying well is a human right. This value, coupled with the fact that people in prison are not dying well, that is, not dying with dignity or compassion is essentially what led to the creation of the Humane Prison Hospice Project. 

The Humane Prison Hospice Project was founded in 2016 by Ladybird Morgan, a nurse and social worker, Sandra Fish, a death row advocate, and Marvin Mutch, who served 41 years in prison at San Quentin and was released after being found innocent in 2016. Ladybird, Sandra, and Marvin, through their own experiences with the prison system, all came to the conclusion that implementing a prison hospice program was urgently needed. There are about 130,000 inmates. There is one state-owned hospice program in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, and it only has seventeen beds. A third of all of those in prison are considered elderly, meaning there is a rapidly growing and urgent need for some sort of end-of-life care in prisons. 

Thus far, Humane Prison Hospice has trained two groups of 16 men at San Quentin as end-of-life caregivers through a program called "Brothers' Keepers." They also have recently partnered with the California Department of Corrections (CDCR), specifically Dr. Michele Ditomas who is the Chief Executive for Palliative Care for the CDCR. The goal of this partnership is to develop and pilot a comprehensive palliative care program that trains those experiencing incarceration in grief support and as end-of-life caregivers. Humane’s tasks in this partnership will be creating a curriculum and launching the pilot programs at the California Medical Facility and also one at The California Women’s Facility. 

The U.S. prison system disproportionately affects low-income and people of color. The popular narrative of prisons, the reason why they are tolerated, is that the function is to address and reduce crime and to rehabilitate those who commit crimes. However, this is not true. Prisons are, essentially, a failure. A 1973 Criminal Justice System study done by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals concluded by saying that the U.S. carceral system had a “shocking record of failure". This is to say that the U.S. carceral system neither reduces crime nor rehabilitates the people that they lock up. 

*The U.S. only houses five percent of the world’s population and yet it houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. 

*In the U.S., more than 200,000 people are serving life in prison. This is one out of every seven. ⅔ of these “lifers” are people of color, with one out of five black men serving a life sentence. 

*57% of all men and 72% of all women in prison were considered to be living in poverty before being arrested

*Black and African Americans make up 12% of the total population, but make up 33% of the prison population. On the other hand, white people make up 64% of the total U.S. population but account for only 30% of the incarcerated population.

*In California, there is a 9:1 black-to-white disparity in the prison population