WHYY: “Maria Rodriguez has a laundry list of health issues: Degenerative spots in her spine, a hernia, two ulcers, and diabetes, which has caused blindness in her left eye. She spends a lot of time in the infirmary at State Correctional Institution Muncy, walking on her bad knee to receive insulin twice a day.

‘I’m dying here,’ Rodriguez, 68, said. ‘It’s like I’m slowly deteriorating in here.’

The stories of six of those women are told in the upcoming podcast ‘Dying on the Inside: Women Lifers at Muncy Prison,’ hosted by Studio 2 co-host Cherri Gregg and produced by the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at Temple University. The five-episode series exploring the crisis of aging prisoners premieres on April 22 and releases episodes on Wednesdays….

‘When we’re talking about unjust sentences and people who’ve been sentenced to life without parole, there’s not a lot of mechanisms for you to petition for relief,’ said Rupalee Rashatwar, a staff attorney at the Abolitionist Law Center in Philadelphia. ‘It’s extremely difficult for people to navigate the process [of commutation].’

‘There are some people who think someone should die in prison,’ Rashatwar added. ‘It’s really important for us to know what that means. What does it really mean to die in a cage? What does it really mean to age behind bars?'”

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