Another look at the challenges prisons face with an aging prison population
NPR has this lengthy new story about an “old” problem for prisons as they figure out how best to deal with an aging prison popultion. I recommend the full piece, which is headlined “The U.S. prison population is rapidly graying. Prisons aren’t built for what’s coming.” Here are excerpts:
Prison is a difficult environment, and people behind bars tend to age faster than people on the outside. For that reason, “geriatric” in prison can mean someone as young as 50, though it varies by state. Any way you define it, the U.S. prison population is getting grayer — and fast.
The proportion of state and federal prisoners who are 55 or older is about five times what it was three decades ago. In 2022, that was more than 186,000 people. In Oklahoma, the geriatric population has quadrupled in the past two decades. In Virginia, a quarter of the state’s prisoners will be geriatric by 2030. And in Texas, geriatric inmates are the fastest-growing demographic in the entire system.
Prison systems across the U.S. have a constitutional obligation to provide adequate health care, and they’re racing to figure out how to care for the elderly in their custody — and how to pay for it…. As that population grows, he says, prisons have to adapt in all kinds of ways: making cells wheelchair accessible, accommodating prisoners who can no longer climb to an upper bunk, providing health care and food inside units when prisoners aren’t mobile, installing more outlets for CPAP machines….
Today, there are more people serving a life sentence in prison than there were people in prison at all in 1970, according to a 2021 report from the Sentencing Project, an advocacy organization.
Caring for aging prisoners is expensive, but the data on just how expensive is murky. A 2013 study estimated it could be anywhere from three to nine times more expensive than for younger prisoners. And a 2015 report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General found that federal prisons with the highest percentage of elderly prisoners spent five times more per person on medical care than those with the lowest percentage of aging prisoners.
A few (of many) older related posts:
- Examining the sources of an ever-aging US prison population
- New major report documents costs and concerns with aging prison populations
- Big new ACLU report highlights the high cost of high numbers of elderly prisoners
- “Aging Prisoners, Increasing Costs, and Geriatric Release”
- “Frail and Elderly Prisoners: Do They Still Belong Behind Bars?”
- US Sentencing Commission reports on “Older Offenders in the Federal System”
- “Nothing but Time: Elderly Americans Serving Life Without Parole”
- Prison Policy Initiative spotlights the “aging prison population”