Photo via Dave Nakayama/Flickr
In 2013 in America, our population is aging and our prisons are full, so we probably should have anticipated that a surplus of elderly prisoners would pose a problem to the system.
After Attorney General Eric Holder speech on federal prisons yesterday, much of the ensuring coverage focused on his suggestion of doing away with mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent offenses. But Holder also proposed other interesting reforms, including compassionate early release for elderly prisoners who no longer pose a threat. The issue of long mandatory sentences and a growing population of elderly in prison are of course interrelated. And for 6 years now, the Justice Department has called the aging prison population an “urgent concern."
There are almost a quarter-million inmates in state and federal prisons that are classified as "elderly" or "aging," according to a 2012 report by the ACLU. Human Rights Watch found that the number of sentenced state and federal prisoners age 65 or older grew at 94 times the rate of the overall prison population between 2007 and 2010.
Incarcerating someone isn’t free. According to the Washington Post, “the average inmate in minimum-security federal prison costs $21,000 each year. The average inmate in maximum-security federal prisons costs $33,000 each year.”
But incarcerating the elderly is even more expensive, on average almost double, at $68,270 per year. And in the cases of the elderly who are sick, the costs can rise to over $100,000 a year.
The rising cost and complexity of incarcerating the aged is far from an exclusively American problem. A study released this month in the journal Health Services and Delivery Research found that “older prisoners are the fastest growing subgroup in the English and Welsh prison estate,” and that 44 percent of those establishments have no established prisoner policies.
And so the staff of the prison is left to figure out how to enforce strict prison rules on those who are sometimes physically unable to stand to be counted, walk long distances to dining halls, or get up on top bunks.
“Prison staff who work with the elderly know it makes no sense to yell at a prisoner who doesn’t understand what they are saying,” Jamie Fellner, senior adviser to the US Program at Human Rights Watch and author of the aforementioned report, said in a press release. “As one sergeant told me, staff have to give older prisoners ‘a little more leeway’ when it comes to enforcing the rules.”
That’s a very humane response to a problem with caused by some questionable logic. “How are justice and public safety served by the continued incarceration of men and women whose bodies and minds have been whittled away by age?” Fellner asked.
The root of the problem, according to Human Rights Watch, comes back to lengthy sentences. One in ten prisoners in a state facility are serving a life sentence and 40.6 percent of state prisoners 51 or older are serving sentences longer than 20 years. On a federal level 11 percent of prisoners older than 51 are serving sentences longer than 30 years.
Federal prison costs are already expected to rise to 30 percent of the Department of Justice’s budget by 2020. With a prison population of 2.4 million behind bars, it may be time to let some of the oldest, frailest, and most peaceful inmates go.