Exploding number of elderly prisoners strains system, taxpayers
By Daniel Arkin, Staff Writer, NBC News
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The number of elderly Americans doing hard time is swelling at a staggering rate and will only continue to balloon, researchers say.
An estimated 246,000 convicts above age 50 were in jail cells across the country last year, according to a June 2012 American Civil Liberties report.
By the year 2030, there will be upward of 400,000 elderly prisoners — nearly a third of the projected total penal population, said Inimai Chettiar, a director at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and the co-author of the ACLU report.
“The number of elderly prisoners has absolutely exploded,” Chettiar said, adding that stringent sentencing policies and “overcriminalization” of historically low-priority offenses are to blame.
Marshall, for example, could have been slapped with house arrest or probation instead of the one- to three-year mandatory minimum sentence he received, she said.
The expenditures associated with keeping elderly prisoners behind bars puts a significant strain on state and federal resources, with taxpayers bearing most of the burden, said David Fathi, the director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
“Incarceration is expensive,” Fathi said. “And incarcerating the elderly is extraordinarily expensive.”
The rising cost of care
State and federal prisons spend an estimated $16 billion taxpayer dollars a year keeping elderly convicts in the clink, Fathi said. Nearly a quarter of that price tag – roughly $3 billion taxpayer dollars annually – is devoted to providing health care to sick or drying prisoners.
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