More
than 100,000 Americans are destined to spend their
final years in prison. Can we afford it?

By James Ridgeway | Tue Sep. 25, 2012

http://www.motherjones.com/print/197066

Editor's
note: This article was
supported by a MetLife Foundation
[1]
Journalists in Aging Fellowship, a collaboration of New
America Media [2] and the Gerontological Society of
America
[3].

William
"Lefty" Gilday had
been in prison 40 years when the dementia began to set in. At 82, he
was already
suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease and a host of other
ailments, and
his friends at MCI Shirley, a medium security prison in Massachusetts,
tried to
take care of him as best they could. Most of them were aging lifers
like Lefty,
facing the prospect of one day dying behind bars themselves, so they
formed an
ad hoc hospice team in their crowded ward. They bought special food
from the
commissary, heated it in an ancient microwave, and fed it to their
friend. They
helped him to the toilet and cleaned him up. Joe Labriola, 64, tried to
see
that Lefty got a little sunshine every day, wheeling his chair out into
the
yard and sitting with his arm around him to keep him from falling out.

But
Lefty, who was serving life
without parole for killing a police officer during a failed bank heist
in 1970,
slipped ever deeper into dementia. One day he threw an empty milk
carton at a
guard and was placed in a "medical bubble," a kind of solitary
confinement unit with a glass window that enables health care staffers
to keep
an eye on the prisoner. His friends were denied entrance, but Joe
managed to
slip in one day. He recalls an overpowering stench of piss and shit and
a stack
of unopened food containers—Lefty explained that he couldn't open the
tabs. Joe
also noticed that the nurses in the adjoining observation room had
blocked the
glass with manila folders so they wouldn't have to look at the old man.

Lefty
had been popular among the
prisoners, though. A minor-league ballplayer turned 1960s radical—his
southpaw,
not his politics, earned him the nickname—he was the subject of one of
the most
infamous manhunts in Massachusetts history. He had already been in and
out of
prison several times on robbery offenses when he fell in with a group
of
Brandeis University students who decided that stealing guns and money
could
help them foment a black revolution. They held up a bank in 1970, and
when
Boston police responded, guns drawn, a patrolman named Walter Schroeder
was
shot dead. Lefty claimed that he never meant to shoot the guy—that it
was a
warning round that ricocheted—but the jury didn't buy it, and he was
convicted
of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. (The students got no
more than
seven years.)

In
1972, after the Supreme Court
briefly banned capital punishment, Lefty became a lifer. Over time, he
also
became a jailhouse lawyer—a inmate paralegal who puts together legal
cases for
fellow prisoners—settling disputes and eventually gaining a rep as
something of
an elder statesman. When Lefty died last September, his friends were
denied
permission to hold a memorial service in the prison chapel, so they
ended up
holding it in a classroom. The service culminated in some 80 men
sailing paper
planes into the air as a tribute. "We loved the old man,'' Joe Labriola
wrote me in a letter.

Lefty
Gilday was no ordinary inmate,
but in one regard he typified a growing segment of America's inmate
population—geriatric
prisoners. The United States leads the world in incarceration, with
more than
2.2 million people in its prisons and jails, and the graying of this
population
is shaping up to be a crisis with moral, practical, and economic
implications for
cash-strapped governments. In recent years, a growing number of
advocates—and
even a handful of corrections officials and politicians—have dared to
suggest
that we consider setting some of these old-timers free.

As of
2010, state and federal
prisons housed more than 26,000 inmates 65 and older and nearly five
times that
number 55 and up, according to a recent Human Rights Watch [4] report. (Both
numbers are
significant, since long-term incarceration is said to add 10 years to a
person's physical age; in prison, 55 is old.) From 1995 to 2010, as
America's
prison population grew 42 percent, the number of inmates over 55 grew
at nearly
seven times that rate. Today, roughly 1 in 12 state and federal prison
inmates
is 55 or older.

The
trend is worsening. A new report
from the American Civil Liberties Union [5]
estimates
that, by 2030, the over-55 group will number more than 400,000—about a
third of
the overall prison population. (See chart.) "It's huge," says Bob
Hood, the former warden of the mammoth federal correctional complex in
Florence, Colorado. "We're behind the eight-ball on this."

From
ACLU report: "At America's Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the
Elderly
The boom in geriatric prisoners is the inevitable result of legislation
from
the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, which extended sentences and
slashed parole
opportunities, both dramatically so. According to a June report by the Pew Center on the States [6], drug
offenders
released in 2009 had spent 36 percent longer behind bars, on average,
than
those released in 1990. One in ten state prisoners nowadays is a lifer,
and
about the same proportion of federal prisoners over 50 are serving 30
to life.
In short, more than 100,000 prisoners are currently destined to die in
prison,
and far more will remain there well into their 60s and 70s. Many of
these
men—as most of them are men—were never violent criminals, even in their
youth.
In Texas, for example, 65 percent of the older prisoners are in for
nonviolent
acts such as drug possession and property crimes.

Keeping
thousands of old men locked
away might make sense to die-hards seeking maximum retribution or
politicians
seeking political cover, but it has little effect on public safety. By age 50, people [7] are far less
likely to
commit serious crimes. "Arrest rates drop to 2 percent," explains
Hood, the retired federal warden. "They are almost nil at the age of
65." The arrest rate for 16-to-19-year-olds, by contrast, runs around
12
percent.

From
ACLU report: "At America's Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the
ElderlyOnce
released, therefore, the vast majority of the older prisoners never
return. Data
from New York state [8], for example, tracked 469 inmates
who were
originally sentenced for violent crimes and were later released as
senior
citizens—over a 13-year period, just 8 of those former inmates went
back to
prison, and only 1 went back for a violent offense. "The mass
incarceration of the elderly is an example of our criminal justice
system at
its most heartless and its most irrational," says David Fathi, director
of
the ACLU's National Prison Project. "Most such prisoners are long past
their crime-prone years and pose little to no public safety risk."

Beyond
any questions of efficacy or
mercy lies the looming issue of the price tag. According to the ACLU,
caring for aging prisoners costs American taxpayers some $16 billion
annually.
We shell out roughly $68,000 a year for each inmate over 50, twice what
it
costs to keep a younger person locked up. And the older the inmate, the
greater
the cost. "I've had inmates where a total cost of $100,000 a year is on
the low side," Hood says.

Even
when you factor in
post-incarceration expenses—for parole, housing, and public benefits
such as
health care—the ACLU projects that taxpayers save $66,000 a year, on
average,
for each inmate over 50 our prisons set free. "States are confronting
the
complex, expensive repercussions of their sentencing practices," notes
a
2010 report from the Vera Institute for Justice [9].

It's
not difficult to see why it
costs so much. "The medical conditions that present themselves to
long-term elderly inmates run anywhere from dialysis to cardiac
treatment to
dementia," says Carl ToersBijns, who worked his way up from guard to
deputy warden during his 30 years in the New Mexico and Arizona prison
systems.
"It is staff intensive," he says. And the number of elderly inmates
"is outgrowing the ability of corrections officers to handle and manage
them—they're not medically trained."

Nor
are prison facilities designed
for people with mobility problems. Their assisted-living and hospice
units are
often chock full, Hood says, leaving the unlucky elders stuck in the
general
population without the services they need. Unless states start
releasing them,
Hood says, we will need to "retrofit every prison in America to put
assisted living-units in it, wheelchair accessibility, handicapped
toilets,
grab bars—the whole nine yards."

In
recent months, I have been
corresponding with several older men in Massachusetts state prisons,
and have
visited one of them in person. They are all lifers with murder
convictions,
which makes them atypical even among the long-termers. These men will
never be
paroled, and they are unlikely to qualify for early release no matter
how
rehabilitated they might be or how aged and decrepit they become. They
have
accepted this, and have generally tried to make something of their
lives in
prison—serving as jailhouse lawyers, organizing against abusive
conditions, and
helping their friends survive.

I am
75, so we share a camaraderie
of sorts as we compare notes on our aches and pains and medication
regimens.
They know I understand what it's like to be getting old and facing
illness and
death. They also know I have no idea what it's like to deal with these
things
behind bars. Their letters tell of lives filled with daily
indignities—trying
to heave an aging body into the top bunk, struggling to move fast
enough to get
a food tray filled or get a book at the library, fighting off younger
troublemakers. But worst of all is the pervasive nothingness and
isolation.

Prison
officials tend to discourage
close friendships, and they dislike anything that smacks of organizing,
which
is considered a security threat. So they routinely transfer inmates
between
prisons and deny them the right to communicate with friends in other
facilities. The activities available—which are few, since lawmakers
wiped out
most rehabilitative programming during the 1980s and 1990s—are
accessible only
to inmates who can walk long prison hallways or climb stairs. For some
old-timers, a cell is their entire world; doing time simply means
awaiting
death.

Joe
Labriola is a former Marine
combat hero. Now 66, he joined the Marines at 17 and served two tours
in
Vietnam, receiving a Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Combat "V" for
valor. After returning home, he was convicted of killing a drug dealer
who was
an FBI informant and got life without parole. So far he has served 38
years—18
in solitary.

Labriola
has chronic breathing
problems that he attributes to Agent Orange exposure. He says it's hard
to for
him walk more than 10 steps without help from an oxygen machine, so
he's in a
wheelchair a lot of the time. At least 75 prisons in 40 states now have
hospices, but you won't find any in Massachusetts. At MCI Shirley,
Labriola
lives in a ward called Assisted Daily Living, which he describes in his
letters
as a clutch of hospital beds in a corridor. "We live in an 11-man ward
with all the beds side by side," he says. "No ventilation or windows
that can open. We do have hospital beds and standing wall lockers,
something
the general population does not have." Unlike most assisted-living
facilities, this setup provides little actual assistance, he says,
other than
what "the prisoners who clean the floor and bathrooms render us when we
ask." Residents get to move around outside the ward for just 10 minutes
every hour, which means the person pushing Joe's wheelchair must race
from
place to place—the prison library, he estimates, is a quarter mile away.

From
his window, Labriola has a view
of the prison hospital. "I see men coming up for medication and insulin
at
least three to four times per day," he says. "They come in chairs,
Canadian canes, geriatric walkers. In one week alone we had three
deaths."
The hospital's inpatient facilities consist of a series of five small
wards
with five beds in each. Men in various stages of bad health or terminal
illness
lie in bed all day long with nothing to do but watch soap operas. "What
they need is mental, spiritual, and human stimulation in the form of a
one-to-one care provided by trained prisoners who would be first
cleared for drug
usage and sex crimes as there are female nurses in the area," Labriola
suggests in one of his letters. "There are many men willing to
volunteer
their time and energies into making this a reality."

Lifer
John Feroli told the following
story in one of his letters: "A guy in his 70s I knew personally was in
the [solitary confinement] unit because he failed to stand for the
afternoon
count. He was on the third floor of the housing unit, he was partially
paralyzed from a stroke and the batteries in his hearing aid were dead
and he
never heard the announcement for Count Time."

Another
convicted murderer,
73-year-old Billy Barnoski, wrote me in April to report that he was in
solitary
after a younger cellmate jumped him and beat him up. His friends came
to his aid,
there was a melee, and four people were thrown in the hole. Barnoski
suffers
from a heart condition called atrial fibrillation, which is treated
with a
blood thinner called coumadin. He also has high blood pressure, high
cholesterol, shingles, and severe arthritis in his back and neck. He
takes 25
pills daily. "There have been many times, so many, that they simply
say,
'We haven't got that med today,'" he writes. "Mind you it has been
heart meds just last week. Locked in this hole without necessary meds
is
torture."

Then
there's Frank Soffen, also 73.
Sentenced to life for second-degree murder, he has spent more than half
of his
life in prison. Nowadays he is confined to a wheelchair. He has kidney
and
liver disease and has suffered four heart attacks. He currently stays
in the
assisted living wing of Massachusetts' Norfolk prison. And because of
his
failing health and his clean record during 40 years behind bars—which
included
rescuing a guard being threatened by other prisoners—he has been held up as a candidate [11] for
compassionate
release.

Soffen
is physically incapable of
committing a violent crime. He cannot even hold a pen, in fact, so I
had to
rely on the other prisoners' accounts of his situation. They told me
has
already participated in prerelease and furlough programs, and has a
supportive
family and a place to live with his son. One member of the state parole
board
recommended his release. But the board has denied him parole twice—in
2006 and
again in January 2011. He won't be eligible for review for another five
years—if he lives that long. These days he's warehoused in a medical
observation bubble, bedridden, clad in adult diapers, unable to wash.

Gordon
Haas, 68, is in better
health, but he too has been in prison the better part of four decades,
ever
since his 1975 conviction for murdering his wife and children. While
inside,
Haas earned a master's degree from Boston University, but such
opportunities
are exceedingly rare nowadays. Ever since Willie Horton [12]—the
furloughed
Massachusetts prisoner who went AWOL and committed murder only to
become the
bane of Michael Dukakis' 1988 failed presidential run—Haas has
witnessed the
rollback of parole and the end of programs that once allowed inmates to
work
outside prison gates and further themselves on the inside.

This
past May, I visited Haas at
Norfolk Prison, about 45 minutes outside Boston. Norfolk was designed
for 750
men and holds 1,500. Built in during the 1920s to mimic a college
campus, its
buildings look more like dormitories than cell blocks, if you ignore
the razor
wire.

Haas
tells me his advocacy for
prison reform has earned him the scrutiny of the prison's Inner
Perimeter
Security force, an internal police unit. They read his letters, he
says, and
monitor his phone calls. So rather than make a formal media request, I
simply
go in as a regular visitor.

Once
I pass through the metal
detectors—presenting ID, taking off my shoes and showing the bottoms of
my
feet, the underside of my collar, and the inside of my waistband—I
proceed
across the campus into a large visiting room filled with rows of
chairs. Prisoners
and visitors may sit next to, but not opposite, one another. They must
keep
their feet flat on the floor at all times and their backs against the
chair
backs. Guards posted at stations at either end of the room roam about
and
escort visitors to the toilet. Prisoners are strip searched before they
enter
and after they leave.

Haas
enters wearing a short-sleeve
button down, pressed blue jeans, and thick glasses. With his neatly
combed gray
hair, he reminds me of an IBM executive on a visit to the factory
floor. He is
affable, and a keen storyteller. In addition to leading the Lifers
Group, a
collection of men unlikely to ever get out, Haas is chairman of the
Store &
Finance Committee of the Norfolk Inmate Council. He takes a big
interest in
Project Youth, which teaches younger prisoners to speak to students and
youth
groups about what led them to prison.

As of
June, according to its own
figures, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections had 11,679
inmates. About
19 percent of them were 50 or older and 6 percent were at least 60.
Last year,
Haas used the DOC's figures to produce his own report [13], which notes that
the 60-plus
contingent is the fastest-growing demographic in the state's prisons.

Haas
says he has been urging the
state to adopt a hospice program for more than 15 years. "Our
contention
is that since lifers will probably be in need of such care, we are a
resource
for others now," he says. But "the DOC does not sanction prisoners
helping other prisoners. There is one outlet, and that is prisoners can
volunteer to take those who can go outside out for programs and fresh
air, even
those in wheelchairs. That is good, but it is all there is."

The DOC confirms that it has neither prison hospices nor immediate
plans to
build any. By 2020, according to the state's DOC Master Plan [14], Massachusetts
will need
three "new specialized facilities" to house an estimated 1,270
prisoners with medical or mental health issues that would preclude them
being
housed in "regular" prisons. "We don't have have a position on
compassionate, geriatric, or any other type of release," a DOC
spokeswoman
told me via email. "That's up to the Legislature." And while
Massachusetts legislators have introduced a bill "establishing criteria
for the compassionate release of terminally ill inmates," it has yet to make it [15] past the "study"
stage.

By
2010, according to the Vera
Institute, 15 states and DC had approved some form of "geriatric
release," while others had medical- or compassionate-release programs
that
could potentially apply to frail, aging prisoners. But "the
jurisdictions
are rarely using these provisions," its report notes, thanks to fearful
politicians, a less-than-sympathetic public, narrow eligibility
criteria, and
red tape that discourages inmates from applying and can draw out the
process
indefinitely. Nobody has aggregated the state-to-state data, but it
appears
that the number of prisoners released under these programs totals no
more than
a few hundred.

"Sixteen
billion [dollars] a
year. Think about that number. It has to wake up some people."

Jack
Donson, who spent 23 years as a
case manager for the federal Bureau of Prisons, points to the
shortcomings of
the Elderly Offender Pilot Program [16],
part of 2008
federal legislation called the Second Chance Act. The law made the
criteria for
early release so strict, and the paperwork so extensive, Donson says,
that it
applied to only a few dozen inmates nationally. "I actually referred
the
first offender in the country" to the program, he notes on his website.
"The bureaucrats deemed this offender dangerous to the community,"
because of a record of violence 30 years earlier, "yet he had been
incarcerated
in a camp setting (without a fence), was a model inmate with an
outstanding
work ethic who even participated in unescorted medical furloughs in the
community."

Little
has changed in the interim.
But Hood believes America is approaching a politically expedient
moment.
"You spend $68,000 to watch an inmate who is truly hospital-bound? I
think
most people would get that. They would understand that if there's
another way
to do it—let's do it outside the prison," he says. "Sixteen billion a
year. Think about that number. It has to wake up some people."

"States
just can't support the
burden anymore," agrees former state warden Carl ToersBijns. "The
only solution will be to release them or to ignore them." If we choose
the
latter, he cautions, prison death rates will skyrocket.

Of
course, ignoring elderly
prisoners after release could be just as devastating. The
ACLU's Fathi
emphasizes that institutionalized old folks will require plenty of help
transitioning back into the community and getting the services they
need.
"For many elderly prisoners," he says, "particularly those with
serious medical needs, simply pushing them out the prison door will be
tantamount to a death sentence."

James
Ridgeway wrote this article
with support from a MetLife Foundation
[1]
Journalists in Aging Fellowship, a collaboration of New
America Media [2] and the Gerontological Society of
America
[3].

Source
URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/massachusetts-elderly-prisoners-cost-compassionate-release

Links:

[1]
https://www.metlife.com/about/corporate-profile/citizenship/metlife...
[2] http://newamericamedia.org/
[3] http://www.geron.org/
[4] http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/01/26/us-number-aging-prisoners-soaring
[5] http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/elderlyprisonreport_20120613_1.pdf
[6]
http://www.pewstates.org/research/reports/time-served-85899394616?p=1
[7]
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/additional-ucr-publications/ag...
[8] http://www.hrw.org/node/104747/section/9
[9]
http://www.vera.org/download?file=2973/its-about-time-aging-prisone...

[10]
http://www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2012/09/elderly-prisoners-ho...

[11]
http://www.thecrimereport.org/archive/the-graying-of-americas-prisons
[12]
http://www.commonwealthmagazine.org/Investigations/What-Works/2012/...

[13]
http://www.realcostofprisons.org/materials/haas_report_on_MA_DOC-20...
[14]
http://www.mass.gov/eopss/massachusetts-corrections-master-plan-pag...
[15] http://www.govtrack.us/states/ma/bills/187/h2173
[16] http://mfpcllc.com/Advocay___Lobbyist.html

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