The lack of qualified staff is particularly problematic for elderly people. The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society reports that healthcare costs are between three and nine times more for older incarcerated individuals than younger ones.ĭespite this high level of healthcare spending, the care most incarcerated individuals receive is inadequate. In 2015, the departments of correction across the country collectively spent more than $8.1 billion on prison health services. Since older individuals in prison have a much higher rate of illness, disability, and mental health disorders, states must shell out more money to provide medical care for them. Reports of mobility impairment, urinary incontinence, hearing impairment, falls, and multimorbidity, and life-threatening illnesses, were all higher for people in prison. Incarcerated individuals reported 14% more problems with functional mobility than the general population. A 2018 study by BMC Health and Justice found that geriatric conditions were more common in prisoners than community-based individuals of the same age. Lack of adequate sleep, insufficient mental stimulation, and lack of friendly social interaction compounds those conditions, making daily life even more grueling. And so what’s happened? Prison populations are graying.” People are spending a longer time in prison. “What you saw was a huge jump in the prison population and what you also saw were that the sentences were just longer.
“Everybody sort of jumped to what seems like the most obvious solution at the time, which was to impose increasingly defensive mandatory sentences and eliminate parole or limit good time reductions to those sentences,” Price said. Mary Price, general counsel at FAMM, a sentencing and prison reform organization, says that the graying prison population is partially rooted in the uncompromising sentencing laws stemming from the War on Drugs in the 1980s and 1990s.
Mandatory minimums and so-called “truth-in-sentencing,” laws that abolish parole and early release, filled prisons with individuals who committed crimes in their teens or early 20s and are now approaching middle to old age. The cause of America’s growing elderly prison population can be traced to policies enacted decades ago.
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