In the Rooms series for The Times, Fred R. Conrad has produced elegant images and sweeping 360-degree panoramas.  More recently, he faced the challenge of photographing the hospital wing of the Coxsackie Correctional Facility, one of New York’s maximum-security prisons. The article, “Fellow Inmates Ease the Pain of Dying in Jail, and Find a Kinship“, and audio slide show focus on prison hospices and on the incarcerated volunteers who serve dying patients.  “The experience is being with them during their final days — it changes you,” Mr. Conrad said. “I wanted to see the effect on men who had done awful things in the past. Was there a chance of redemption?”  The story was inspired in part by personal experience: Mr. Conrad’s first wife had received hospice care in their home.  Mr. Conrad and the reporter, John Leland, traveled to a prison in Connecticut but discovered there were no hospice patients being treated. Many other attempts to identify subjects ended in disappointment.  Finally, they were granted half a day at Coxsackie, in Greene County, by the New York State Department of Corrections. Because the prison is near a large hospital with a trauma unit, the sickest prisoners in New York are transferred there. Of the four patients who had signed releases to be photographed and interviewed, one changed his mind and one died. Another, Allen Jacobs, was judged too sick to participate at first.  Mr. Conrad and Mr. Leland began with a volunteer, John Henson, and a patient, Eddie Jones. The next day, they persuaded the prison to let them return and spend time with the volunteer Wensley Roberts and Mr. Jacobs, whose health had improved.  How do you tell a compelling visual story when the subject is confined to a drab hospital room behind bars?  “You start looking for small moments,” Mr. Conrad said. “People touching hands, reading a Bible. But mostly you’re just sitting around.”  The powerful black-and-white images show the caged environment, the comfort of human contact through surgical gloves and the intense and fearful eyes of a man on his deathbed. They are moments of humanity in an otherwise stark setting.  “It doesn’t pay anything or go toward any good behavior or time off,” Mr. Conrad said. “These men are allowed to pass with dignity and have someone there 24/7, and it doesn’t cost the state anything because these guys are volunteers. It’s not so much about death but the transformation of the volunteers.”
Fred R. Conrad spends time with dying prisoners, as Niko Koppel reports, looking for small moments of consolation, comfort, redemption and grief.