We used to hold funerals in the prison chapel. There was a sheet-covered table with a dais in front of it, and on top of that was a small cardboard coffin that one of us had made and painted glossy black. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and all the staff left, the body count in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prisons has been too high for funerals.
At one point there was a monthly Grief Group where you could eulogize those you’d recently lost. Or just sit in the company of others grieving and keep your thoughts to yourself. So many people die in here now that regular mass wakes are a non-starter—written off as a security threat, one way or another. But they wouldn’t cost anything.
At the maximum-security Georgia State Prison (Reidsville) there’s a cemetery where the state used to bury people who died in prison, when no one from the free world claimed the body. Which isn’t to say the deceased had no one who missed them; claiming the body makes one responsible for the burial costs. Reidsville was closed down in 2022, but the state had already stopped burying people there and shifted to cremation. Cheaper.
“Down at Reidsville the burial detail might say some words if they knew the guy,” Adam*, incarcerated since the mid-1980s, told Filter. “And there was always one that would read over the freshly filled graves. The cemetery—’Piss-ant Hill’—was open to the public. Local church groups and tourist would visit if no burials were taking place. I guess some was mourners.”
Prison wakes were often the only time someone was eulogized properly.
It’s difficult for prisoners to host services on their own. No one would judge you for attending a wake at the chapel, but someone trying to organize one in the dorms would look like a soft target.
“We each feel the grief,” said Bill*, also incarcerated since the mid-80s. “And we all keep a lid on that because it seems that each of us is the only one grieving for friends who have died. Needless deaths, for the most part.”
Prison wakes were often the only time someone was eulogized properly. In many cases, those of us who’d shared a living unit with the deceased, who’d gotten to know them day-to-day in the later years of their life, have a lot more good things to say about them than their family might.
But there are also many cases where the people who knew them in prison and the people who knew them from the free world have gotten to know each other. Over years or decades of passing each other in visit rooms, or chiming in for snippets of phone calls.
Even if you’ve never met them in person, when you’re close to someone you often know the names of the other important people in their life, and might regularly ask how things are going with those people, too. It would mean something to be able to grieve with each other. This isn’t permitted, even if limited to a small number of prisoners and the definitionally small number of people from the deceased’s approved visitor list, but it still wouldn’t cost anything.
“These days my old mind is getting confused as to who died for real and who made parole.”
“I don’t befriend many short-timers [because] they’re going to leave and, most of the time, it is as if they died,” Adam said. “These days my old mind is getting confused as to who died for real and who made parole. Maybe funerals would help me put my memories in different boxes.”
People serving short sentences aren’t necessarily feeling the loss of prison wakes the same way. But for those of us who live here long-term, their function was about more than just closure. Sometimes we need them in order to remember why someone disappeared, given how frequently that happens.
“Remember how we used to talk about the parole religion?” Bill said. “Caseworkers were the local priests, deputy wardens as archbishops, wardens as bishops. And us little monk worshipers writing out our prayer petitions, just trying to have faith that each office above would endorse and push our prayers into the hands of the clemency department—who were the Cardinals—to present cases favorably before the [parole] board member gods. I don’t know where funerals and rites figure into that, but at yours that will be what I talk about.”
*Names have been changes to protect sources
Image (cropped) via Oklahoma Department of Corrections/YouTube
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