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New York Prison Creates Dementia Unit
"This group is going to mirror what's going on in our nursing homes. You have the terminally ill, you have people who have strokes in this population, you have people who have dementia," said Aday, of Middle Tennessee State University.
Fishkill, a 1,700-inmate, medium-security prison some 70 miles north of New York City, serves as a regional medical hub for the system. Inmates can get everything from throat cultures to long-term nursing care at the modern medical center built inside the prison's accordian-wired perimeter.
  An inmate stands on a balcony overlooking the Hudson Valley in a dementia unit at Fishkill State Prison in Fishkill, N.Y., Wednesday, May 16, 2007. New York prison officials faced with a graying inmate population have created the system's first cognitively impaired unit, providing a relative peace and safety within the prison for the men with faded faculties. (AP Photo/Mike Groll) (Mike Groll - AP) 
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The dementia unit opened in October and is still getting up to speed. Twenty inmates from state prisons around the state _ Attica, Midstate, Coxsackie, Orleans _ are now patients.
Neither the American Correctional Association nor several experts in prison geriatrics were aware of any other special prison units for inmates with dementia.
Prison health care consultant Dr. Robert Greifinger said the idea makes sense because staff can be trained to deal with the special cases.
All workers on the Fishkill unit _ nurses, corrections officers, housekeepers _ go through a 40-hour training course to learn how to work with the cognitively impaired.
The job can be especially tricky for corrections officers, who usually must fill out a report every time they touch an inmate. Here, contact comes with the territory. Officers are trained to know that, on this ward, an outburst by an inmate could be a symptom of a troubled mind instead of a hostile act.
"A lot of times it would be construed as bad behavior," Sottile said, "but they have no idea what they're doing."
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