Academic

Grandma jailbird

By Laura Appleman

Salon has an interesting article on the growing numbers of geriatric women who are incarcerated.   Drawing on Viji Sundaram's excellent article, Golden Girls Behind Bars, the piece notes not only the difficulties of being imprisoned in your 70's and 80's, but the incredible costs of housing and medicating the elderly prisoner:

"I've seen 70- and 80-year-old women with arthritis trying to crawl up to the upper bunks," says one inmate in Sundaram's article. Prisoners talked about the difficulty of paying for wheelchairs and hearing aides out of the $14 per month they earned as prison janitors. Mostly, women were just terrified of the idea of growing infirm and dying in prison. "My fear of being here even five more years, even two more years," said one inmate, "is ending up in a wheelchair and having to depend on people that can care less whether I lived or died."

Unsurprisingly, geriatric prisoners experience high rates of hypertension, osteoporosis, asthma and diabetes. Taking care of these problems in prison is not exactly cost-effective. As Sundaram points out, an elderly prisoner generally costs taxpayers $60,000-$90,000 per year -- two to three times as much as the average, younger inmate and far more than the price of a hospice or nursing home.

You might think that these geriatric inmates would be good candidates for parole, given the expense and difficulty of imprisoning them.  But you would be wrong.  Even in this dire financial climate, early parole continues to be incredibly unpopular as a political move--because, as we all know, those gangs of roving released grannies really prey upon the law-abiding population!  Yet another way in which our criminal justice system begs for reform....

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on February 16, 2009 (boomark / email).