(NEW YORK) MintPress – George Sanges does not fit the typical image of a prison inmate. At 75-years-old, a thin layer of white fuzz covers his head, his sallow skin is deeply wrinkled and, suffering from cerebral palsy, he uses a wheelchair and cane to support himself.
But Sanges is serving a 15-year sentence at Men’s State Prison in Georgia for aggravated assault against his wife of 48 years.
He shares a hostel-like ward with veterans who served in World War II and spends his days playing card games and checkers.
Sanges is, in fact, part of the fastest growing prison population in the country: The elderly.
According to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “At America’s Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly,” the number of aging and older people who are incarcerated has exploded over the past three decades, and some 246,000 inmates aged 50 or over are now behind bars. Fifty is the criminological consensus of when a prisoner becomes “elderly” because people age faster behind bars.
That is a whopping 1,300 percent increase from the early 1980s. And at this rate, by 2030 these older inmates will constitute more than a third of the prison population.
“Extremely disproportionate sentencing policies…have turned our prisons into nursing homes, and taxpayers are footing the bill,” said ACLU advocacy and policy counsel Inimai Chettiar, who is one of the report’s lead authors.
And, according to ACLU economist William Bunting, that is to the tune of $16 billion a year.
Contributing factors
The ACLU found that the graying of the country’s prisons is largely the result of harsh sentencing laws enacted during the 1980s and 1990s.
“The statistics taken together strongly suggest that the increasing incarceration of aging prisoners is not due to any ‘older crime wave’ but rather due to younger prisoners who are sentenced to longer terms in prison, often for not-so-serious crimes,” states the report.
Many states implemented statutes that meant extraordinarily long sentences, including life in prison, for repeat offenders, even for those convicted of a series of relatively minor crimes.
Harsh “truth-in-sentencing” laws, which dictate that inmates serve the majority of their sentences before being eligible for parole, also led to a sharp increase in the number of people growing older in prison.
At the same time, according to the ACLU, there is “overwhelming evidence” that most prisoners over 50 pose little or no threat to public safety.
Strain on states and society
Meanwhile, as the health care debate continues to rage nationwide, the prison community faces its own battle against rising medical costs.
That’s largely because the elderly need more frequent and costlier treatment, which states are required to provide under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.
“Elderly inmates are more likely to have health problems, which increases substantially the economic burden,” said Professor William Alex Pridemore of the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. “More generally, rates of infectious disease like TB and hepatitis are very high, and very expensive to treat.”
The ACLU estimates that on average, each prisoner costs the state roughly $34,135 of taxpayer money a year to house, while an elderly prisoner costs $66,270, nearly twice as much.
“While some of these prisoners may turn to the government for their health care or other needs, government expenditures on released aging prisoners will be far cheaper than the costs of incarcerating them,” said Bunting, the ACLU economist.
“Simply put, it is an unwise use of taxpayer dollars to spend enormous amounts of money locking up elderly prisoners who no longer need to be behind bars.”
New rules recommended
The ACLU has suggested that states grant elderly prisoners access to a parole hearing, during which a parole board or similar body can evaluate whether the prisoner can be safely released.
Last year, Louisiana, which has some of the worst prison overcrowding in the country, passed a law that allows inmates to go before a parole board upon turning 60, provided they meet certain criteria, including that they were not convicted of violent or sex-related crimes.
Marjorie Esman, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said in a statement at the time, “Louisiana should not be using taxpayer dollars to lock up elderly individuals when they pose no danger to our communities.”
The ACLU’s Chettiar described the legislation as “an excellent first step.”
Public controversy
Criminology expert James Alan Fox, a professor at Northeastern University, says that age should be just one consideration in determining eligibility for release. The more important indicators, he asserts, are the type of crime committed and how long the inmate has been behind bars.
“There are scenarios that are so heinous in nature that they forfeit their right to live free regardless of their life cycle,” Fox maintains.
He points to the case of serial killer David Berkowitz, aka “Son of Sam,” who is now 59 and behind bars for murdering six people and wounding several others in a series of shootings that terrorized New York City in the mid-1970s.
“It’s unlikely society would look favorably on his early release,” he notes.
Meanwhile, a victims’ advocacy group wants any proposal for an early-release program to take into account those who have been hurt by a crime.
The primary concerns surrounding any form of early or premature release of convicted criminals involve decisions made without any consideration or consultation of victims,” said Will Marline, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance in a statement.
“Such survivors of seemingly ‘lesser crimes’ commonly suffer the deepest losses because of crime. We owe it to victims to recognize how that release impacts them.”
Still, critics elsewhere have lambasted the U.S. for incarcerating such a large number of non-violent and victimless offenders, and for keeping them behind bars for much longer than elsewhere.
Prison sentences here have become «vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,» wrote Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, in The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.
And Human Rights Watch said in a recent report, “The U.S. Addiction to Incarceration,” that this “wreaks havoc on individuals, families and communities, and saps the strength of the nation as a whole.»
“We need to introduce proportionality into sentencing here. Is the punishment fitting the crime?” insists ACLU counsel Chettiar.
“If we continue spending on prisons the way that we are, particularly on this aging population that’s low risk, we’re going to get to a place where states can’t afford to spend on anything else.”