I went to Tampa Hospital Tuesday for my initial screening for the transplant program. The facts are these. Over 92,000 people in the US are awaiting kidney donors and 4000 will die this year waiting. The best results are obtained from living donors but 1% of living donors will die as a result of the procedure. OTOH living donors, quite rightly, have priority should they need a kidney later in life.

We have in the US an enormous pool of potential donors in our prisons. Mostly men serving long sentences with no realistic chance of ever getting out short of having their sentence commuted or being granted a pardon by the President or state Governor. Has any effort been made by the National Kidney Foundation or anyone else to set up a program whereby prison inmates could offer kidneys as part of a sentence reduction program or just a humanitarian gesture to impress a parole board?