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THE AGING OF AMERIA'S PRISONERS
The "tough on crime" posturing and policymaking that have dominated American politics for more than three decades have left behind a grim legacy. Longer sentences and harsher parole standards have led to overcrowded prisons, overtaxed state budgets, and devastated families and communities. Now, yet another consequence is becoming visible in the nation's prisons and jails: a huge and ever-growing numbers of geriatric inmates.
Increasingly, the cells and dormitories of the United States are filled with old, often sick men and women. They hobble around the tiers with walkers or roll in wheelchairs. They fill prison infirmaries, assisted living wings, and hospices faster than the state and federal governments can build them""and since many are dying behind bars, they are filling the mortuaries and graveyards as well.
The care these aging prisoners receive, while often grossly inadequate, is nonetheless cripplingly expensive" - so much so that some recession-strapped states are for the first time seriously considering releasing older terminally ill and mentally ill prisoners rather than pay the heavy price for their warehousing. It remains to be seen what will happen when such fiscal concerns run head on into America's taste for punitive justice. A recent report by the Vera Institute made this clear. . .
According to the Sentencing Project, the United States imprisons five times as many people as it did 30 years ago and more than seven times as many as it did 40 years ago. Our criminal justice system now keeps 2.3 million people behind bars" - about half of them for drug offenses and other nonviolent crimes. Twenty-five years ago, there were 34,000 prisoners serving life sentences; today the number is more than 140,000. The fact that each person is spending a longer stretch behind bars means that the falling crime rates of the 1990s do not translate into fewer inmates. It also means that more and more people who committed offenses in their 20s or even their teens are growing old and dying in prison.
3 Comments:
"considering releasing older terminally ill and mentally ill
Oh, that's good. What are those people supposed to do then? Euthanizing them would probably be more humane.
"More laws, more thieves." - Old Chinese saying. More victims (through expanding definitions of offenses), more perpetrators. So? They are not just going to go away.
Reducing the prison population is just not a viable option. It will severely damage the private prison industry and, as we all know, that means fewer jobs. Plus, it will make the stock of the private prison companies nosedive, thereby destroying the value of portfolios. So this is just not politically acceptable, is it?
Welcome to economic gridlock. This is what happens when every issue, every venue, is driven entirely by profit-taking. Prisoners are now the raw material for a whole industry. The idea of rehabilitation and guidance away from criminal and self-destructive activity is just not important in the scheme of things.
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