Old Inmates
Elderly Prison Population Soaring
By Daniel Muniz

The number of aging inmates in our nation’s prisons is soaring. In fact, the number of older prisoners has reached record proportions and right now there is no end in sight. The country experienced an explosive growth of prison construction in the 1990’s in order to accommodate much tougher sentencing laws that would permanently get thugs and lowlife degenerates off the streets and into prison cells.

Habitual violent offenders who were accustomed to enjoying the revolving door of justice found themselves locked up for much longer periods of time and many now have no chance of ever enjoying freedom again as many states finally started to get serious with violent crime. And Southern states are feeling the greatest impact of this trend because they enacted some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country.

The biggest drawback to this approach is that our prisons are once again full because of the older inmates.

In addition, states are beginning to feel the financial pinch as elderly prisoners need extensive medical care. Many inmates already engaged in risky lifestyles involving sex, drugs, and violence before stepping into a correctional institution so they have plenty of health problems to begin with. And the violent and dangerous nature of prison itself adds a whole new dimension to healthcare because being incarcerated is not a very safe lifestyle for the physical and emotional wellbeing of prisoners with long sentences.

As a result, it costs a lot of money to care for people who never took care of themselves in the first place and many are not intent on changing their ways after getting locked up because a destructive lifestyle is simply part of their daily regimen. Not surprisingly, medical costs continue to skyrocket when prisoners get older especially when they are wracked with debilitating diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

So the question arises about what should be done with older inmates particularly since states are on the hook for expensive treatments.

The “hug a thug” critics who never liked incarcerating violent offenders in the first place argue that it is pointless to keep people locked up in prison if they are dependent on canes, walkers, or wheelchairs as well as for those who are too sick to even get out of bed or who are too old to climb up to the top bunk.

But the best thing for society to do is to continue to keep these hoodlums in jail.

There is no way to escape the rising healthcare expenses but there is a way to limit the overall costs.

Sickly and elderly inmates need to be permanently transferred to minimum security facilities. It is not as if they can scale a fence topped with razor wire or dig a tunnel to freedom. In addition, such facilities do not have to be reinforced concrete bunkers set out in a desolate wasteland. Instead, they can be constructed with inexpensive prefabricated materials or they can even be wooden structures. The point is that these facilities don’t have to be anywhere near the same level of construction that their maximum security counterparts are.

And to help push costs even lower, these minimum security facilities don’t have to be built out in the middle of nowhere.

For someone who needs a walker or is confined to a wheelchair, escape is no longer much of a concern and that is where states can enjoy tremendous savings by constructing these kinds of low cost facilities. There is absolutely no reason why elderly prisoners should need to be housed in outrageously expensive maximum security correctional institutions. Those places should be reserved for the hardened criminals who are still very much a dangerous threat to the rest of the prison population and to prison staff.

But shouldn’t states have some kind of leniency and let these geriatric inmates go home?

The simple answer is hell no.

Well, isn’t it heart-wrenching to keep old people locked up when they are no longer a threat to society?

My response is what about the heart-wrenching pain that these thugs inflicted on their victims?

When it comes to violent crime, there are acts that are so heinous that the debt to society is either very long sentences or life in prison. That is simply the unfortunate consequence of violent behavior.

And there is absolutely no doubt that it must be brutal for someone to have to die in prison instead of enjoying their last days in freedom but that is the price to pay for violent crime. And perhaps that ought to be message that needs to be articulated to young hoods in that they could suffer the fate of someday becoming an old sickly inmate confined to a walker or wheelchair.

Prison is an awful place but it is reserved for people who made despicable choices that not only ruined their lives but ruined and/or ended the lives of their victims.

Any opinions or views expressed herein belong solely to the author and does not represent any employer, organization, political party, governmental agency, or any other entity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the site owner or its participants.