This volume of the JPP looks at the aging process inside prisons, where every problem is amplified by the prisoner’s age.
From the changing nature of dreams, valiant attempts to forestall mental decline, and thwarted attempts to access education, to the pain of watching children grow up without them, and the impossibility of adequate care in their declining years, prisoners share the desperation of growing old behind bars. Even in the stultifying environment of prison, however, personal growth can and does fl ourish and prisoners can contribute in many ways. Is the person who committed a crime in 1965 or 1985 still the same person in 2005? The resilience of the human spirit and the power of time, even in the absence of any other encouragement towards rehabilitation, have proven themselves over and over again. But even “model prisoners” are permanently held suspect.
What kind of justice system have we constructed when even professed Christians no longer believe in redemption and forgiveness? “Godot never arrived, and Vladimir and Estragon only grew older while they waited.”
Published in English.

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Until her retirement in June 2014, Susan Nagelsen was the director of the writing program at New England College in Henniker, NH. Unable to stay away from the classroom, she is now a professor at Curry College in Milton, MA and also teaches for Granite State College in Concord, NH. She is a senior consulting editor for BleakHouse Publishing, whose offices are in American University in Washington, DC. She also finds room in her busy schedule to serve as the associate editor and frequent contributor for the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, a peer-reviewed criminal-justice journal published by the University of Ottawa.