Prisoners, Elderly

Criminal justice theorists and researchers have indicated that there are, in fact, four distinct populations of aging inmates in our nation's prison systems. Some are persons who were placed in prison for a long sentence at an early age, and have aged in the prison, with all the risks to health and well-being associated with long-term incarceration. These inmates may not have lived any significant proportion of their lives outside the prison. Prior to incarceration, these inmates may not have been career criminals, but at an early age they committed a crime sufficient to place them behind bars for the remainder of their lives. Often, freedom is hardly remembered; the prison is their home. (For more on the long-term effects of imprisonment on both the inmate and society, see Flanagan 1995.)

The second group is composed of inmates who have spent significant proportions of their lives behind bars, but whose sentences were interrupted with time spent on the outside. These periods were brief and ended with another conviction. This is life “on the installment plan,” because many of them will eventually commit crimes with sufficient seriousness or frequency to place them in prison for the remainder of their natural lives.

The third group are middle-aged and often healthy, but they have committed a crime and received a sentence that will result in their long-term incarceration. These inmates are aging in the prison. They may not be career criminals, but they will remain incarcerated for a long period, like a career criminal.

The final group is composed of persons similar to the first group in two important ways but different in one important way as well. The members of this group have committed crimes that resulted in sentences equivalent to the remainder of their natural lives, and—as with the first group—this crime may have been their only serious conviction. The difference is that the members of this group were old when they committed their first crime, and they had lived relatively law-abiding lives until the point of this conviction. These persons often are unfamiliar with the criminal lifestyle, but they are now convicts, and they will remain so for the remainder of their days. These groups indicate an important issue in the discussion of elderly inmates: Although these inmates often look the same, they may come from different backgrounds and histories, and thus create different problems in the prison, problems that require different solutions. The problems created by this last group, however, are likely to continue to increase. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population aged sixty-five and older increased from 20 million to 35 million between 1970 and 1999. This population is expected to increase dramatically beginning in 2010, when the first wave of baby boomers will reach age sixty-five (http://www.aoa.dhhs.gov).