USA: what should we do about our aging prison population?

In the U.S. today, more people are dying of old age in prison than ever before. American prisons, in other words, are holding a swelling population of elderly inmates. According to Bureau of Justice figures from 2017, nearly 200,000 people aged 55 and older are incarcerated in America.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A policy option called “compassionate release” grants sick and elderly inmates a chance to spend their final days outside of a prison cell. First implemented in the 1970s, all 50 states except Iowa currently have some kind of related law, although policies between states vary widely. Some, like California and Maryland, distinguish between “geriatric release,” which is age-dependent, with “compassionate release,” which offers early release for inmates who are ill.

Of the 1.5 million adults currently in state and federal prisons, the 55+ demographic represents roughly twelve percent, which represents a 300 percent spike in the elderly population since 1999. In the six years between 2001 and 2007 alone, 8,486 people over the age of 55 died behind bars. And the problem is only intensifying. By 2030, the number of elderly prisoners is expected to reach 400,000—an alarming 4,400 percent increase since 1981, according to a 2012 report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Christie Thompson, a reporter for The Marshall Project, tells the story of Anthony Bell, a man serving his last year of a 16-year sentence for selling cocaine. Bell applied for compassionate release in 2014, after suffering from liver failure and lupus. “The Bureau of Prisons denied his request in April 2015, saying he had too long to live,” Thompson writes. “He died two days later.”

In order to be granted compassionate release, inmates must submit an application to the Bureau of Prisons. But it’s not likely to be granted. The Bureau received 5,400 applications between 2013 and 2017, of which it approved only 6 percent (or 324). The Marshall Project reviewed the denials, exposing the reality that doctors and wardens were often overruled in their support for compassionate release.

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