Much sadder sentence

"My friend Sam almost died last week." That was the first sentence of my article "Growing Old in Prison," published in America last Nov. 10. Today I must write a new, much sadder sentence: my friend Sam died yesterday afternoon.

Five days ago, during a spell of unusually cold weather, Sam began to feel congested and weak, and--quite sensibly for a 63-year-old--he reported to the prison infirmary. In my earlier article I compared penitentiary medical care to penitentiary food: the operative motto is "as little as possible, as cheap as possible." True to this guiding principle, the nurses told Sam ...