Welcome to

The Outside Inn

A rest stop on your journey home.

Our Mission

At The Outside Inn, our mission is to provide compassionate, dignified, and supportive hospice care to individuals with lived experience in the carceral system. We believe in a Good Death. For every person. Feeling comfort and peace in the dying process should not come second to the state’s interest in punishment and confinement.Our mission is to provide folks with emotional, spiritual, and physical care while walking alongside them into this great unknown. Our commitment extends to supporting loved ones and caregivers by fostering an environment of grace and profound respect for every human death.

Those granted Special Needs Parole

Those no longer in state custody

Those dying in prison

Our caregivers and community

In 2023 ~20 individuals were notated as “End of Life” by Department of Corrections doctors. These people should be released from prison. However, without a place to go or an adequate “release plan” these people remain stuck and dying in prison. We hope to provide the housing, resources, and end of life care that will allow people to leave prison and die in a homelike environment in the community. Additionally, while some people may technically have caretakers in the community, we may be able to alleviate families and loved ones from the extremely heavy burdens that come alongside caring for a dying person.

The principles that drive our team apply to people both within and outside of prison walls. There are often insurmountable obstacles to accessing end of life care for people with a criminal record. We hope to provide end of life care for individuals who may not be in prison but have been impacted by the carceral system.

The Outside Inn will continue to provide training and education to nurses and other caregivers charged with end of life care for folks who have no option but to die in prison. Through this effort, we hope to close the gap between palliative and end of life care provided in the community and the care given within prisons.

Care for the dying is impossible without caring for the living. The Outside Inn will provide employment, training, and support for community members impacted by the carceral system. Additionally, the families and loved ones of those passing will be provided with emotional and spiritual guidance through their loved one’s dying process as well as the initial grieving period.

The Social Model of Hospice is a community-driven approach to end-of-life care that prioritizes emotional, social, and spiritual well-being over clinical interventions. Rooted in compassion, it provides 24/7 care in a home-like environment, ensuring dignity and comfort for individuals and their families.The vast majority of hospice care is provided to people in their homes. A patient enrolls in hospice and the medical facility sends personnel and equipment to the patient’s home. Social Model hospice homes act as simply another home the medical provider services–but instead of one dying patient, there are multiple.This model is a return to the roots of community hospice care, where death was once embraced as a natural part of life and supported by neighbors and loved ones. By filling the gap between the desire to die at home and the lack of resources to make it possible, the Social Model meets the needs of those who might otherwise face their final days in isolation or institutional setting such as prison.In reconnecting communities to the dying process, this model fosters presence, healing, and connection, empowering families to focus on meaningful time together during life’s final chapter.

The social model of hospice

why it matters

We cannot make a slide about maximizing returns or the economic efficiencies baked into caring for the dying. Our project matters for reasons we cannot graph. We will help a small number of individuals to feel loved and cared for as they die. We will help them to know they are not alone. Then they will be gone.We hope to care for ~20 people a year at The Inn. Our educational initiatives to train caregivers in prisons will impact similar numbers of dying people.We believe that caring for people who society treats the most cruelly is a profound and unquantifiable exercise in human grace.We want to live in a world that encourages deeply impacting small numbers of individuals solely because their dignity as humans matters. We hope to find partners who believe in this too.