Old behind bars

J, a guy in my writing group at the penitentiary, stopped coming to our bi-monthly workshop. I found out it was because he couldn’t climb the long flight of concrete stairs up to the second floor room where we held our sessions. He had diabetes. His foot had become infected. There were complications. He was 66. He had been in prison for 37 years.

M, another of the men in the writing group, also stopped showing up. I found out it was because he was bedridden in the prison’s infirmary after a knee-replacement operation. He was 59. He had been in prison for 30 years.

When we sentence wrong-doers to decades-long prison sentences, what happens is that—no surprise–they age in prison. That is, they become old behind bars. And they become older faster than the rest of us. It’s estimated that incarcerated people age about 15 years faster than we do. (Fifty-five is considered “elderly” in the world of incarceration. Medically, biologically, their 55 is our 70.)

It’s no surprise why prisoners age faster. They live in noisy, crowded, stressful, toxic environments with poor quality nutrition, limited physical exercise, poor sleep and no access to the natural world. They suffer the physical limitations and diseases that often come with age, including Alzheimer’s.

Right now there are more than 200,000 people aged 55 or older in our prisons. From 1999 to 2016, the number of people 55 or older in state and federal prisons increased 280 percent. By 2030 it’s estimated that 1 in 3 prisoners will be 50 or older.

Prisons were not built for or equipped to handle physically compromised people who cannot pull themselves up to the top bunk in a cell or climb up and down stairs or walk across vast expanses of institutionalized space to get to chow hall or the infirmary. They were not built for or equipped to handle those with cognitive issues like dementia.

One solution? Build geriatric prisons. The Kansas legislature will be considering a recommendation next month to renovate a prison to serve as a 250-bed geriatric care facility. Price tag: $9-10 million for renovations, $8.3 million per year for operations. Over the next decade, we could spend hundreds of millions of dollars remodeling and retrofitting prisons as nursing homes.

Or, how about this: We stop sentencing people to absurdly long prison terms.

Criminology research shows that lengthy terms actually have little effect on deterring crime. And that older prisoners pose very little, if any, threat to communities if released.