For generations, New York state prisoners who died were buried in graveyards just outside prison walls, under headstones marked with prisoner identification numbers — but no names.
In recognition of the idea that people shouldn’t be defined in eternity by their periods of incarceration, state officials recently and quietly changed course. A state directive outlining the corrections department’s responsibilities when a person dies in custody was updated at the start of the pandemic and mandated that prisoner names be added to all future gravestones. And some prison officials are going a step further -- adding plaques with names to the gravestones of people who died decades ago.
“We recognize their humanity,” said Rev. Alfred Twyman, a state prison chaplain who officiates prisoners’ funerals. “We recognize them as people, not just a number, but people. So to me, spiritually as a pastor, it's a wonderful thing.”
The cemetery at Green Haven Correctional Facility.
New York state officials didn’t publicly announce the new policy. The change only came to light when a formerly incarcerated California man, Matthew Hahn, tweeted about visiting the cemetery at the maximum security Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County. His in-laws live nearby, and they told him that some tombstones at the prison graveyard lacked names. His mother-in-law, Patti Clarke, was appalled. So on a visit in February, Hahn grabbed his camera and checked it out for himself.
“In many ways, the way that we talk about people who are incarcerated, the way that we treat people who are incarcerated, the way that we bury people who died while incarcerated is an attempt at depersonalizing them, and depersonifying them,” Hahn said.
Hahn discovered that there were indeed some gravestones that lacked names. But at the cemetery he also encountered a prison employee who — before politely kicking him off the grounds — told him that names were in the process of being added to the gravestones.
On a recent afternoon at the cemetery, maintenance staff solemnly tacked new plaques — with names, dates of birth and dates of death — to old gravestones that only had prisoner ID numbers etched into them.
The cemetery sits on a rolling, daffodil-filled meadow located down a dirt road just out of sight of the maximum security prison’s massive concrete walls.
Late last year, a 65-year-old man who had been locked up since he was 25 died at the prison, said Mark Miller, Green Haven's superintendent. The family couldn’t afford a burial, but they were able to come up to Green Haven from New York City, Miller said. So the prison arranged a graveside service, with the maintenance staff preparing a casket covered in a black cloth, he said.
“We take a lot of pride in the burials here,” said Miller. “We allowed them to lay flowers on [the casket] and give them the proper closure, and they knew that they had the dignity of a proper burial.”
Twyman, who officiated that burial, said adding names to the gravestones offers the deceased “respect and dignity.”
State prison chaplain, Rev. Alfred Twyman.
“They should be afforded what anyone else would be afforded in passing, regardless of the incident or the mistake that led them here,” he said. “Any mistakes they made, they were judged. That's all been done. But now here they can lay to rest and lay to rest peacefully.”
Green Haven has the oldest prison population in the state, on average, Miller said. About two people die each year. “And that's the last phone call — the hardest phone call — that a superintendent ever wants to make, is to a family to let them know that someone has passed away in the facility,” he said.
Hahn said seeing some gravestones without names reminded him of a cemetery for enslaved people that he had once visited, where the grave markers likewise lacked names. “And it struck me that there's a way that we memorialize people and … if the social context in which the person died was such that the powers that be didn't want them remembered, they didn't get the ability to be remembered,” he said.
The new gravestone plaques at New York state prisons still include the ID numbers — just underneath the names. As someone who is formerly incarcerated, Hahn doesn’t like that the numbers are still there. He also thinks the graveyard should be more publicly accessible. He doesn't want those who were once incarcerated to be forgotten — either in death or in life.
One of the new gravestone designs.
“Even if for the years that they spent incarcerated there the people that were overseeing them didn't see them as people, we as society can still hold them as people that are deserving of being remembered,” he said.
At least now, he said, their names can be remembered in stone, forever.
