The U.S. aging prison population.
A study by the Pew Charitable Trust reported in 2018 that at the end of 2016, fewer people were held in state and federal prisons than in any year since 2004.
That would be the good news.
The bad news is that the prisons are now increasingly made up of the sick and elderly.
From 1999 to 2016, the number of people 55 or older in state and federal prisons increased 280 percent. During the same period, the number of younger adults grew merely 3 percent. As a result, older inmates swelled from 3 percent of the total prison population to 11 percent.
By 2020, 14 percent of male prisoners and 9 percent of female prisoners—a total of 165,700 people—were ages fifty-five and older.
More recently, but more than four years ago, former President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill that he promised would free terminally ill and aging prisoners who pose little or no threat to public safety.
At the time the law was passed there were predictions it would save taxpayers money and reverse law-and-order policies that drove incarceration rates in the U.S. to the highest in the world.
It was a false promise.
Data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows judges rejected more than 80% of compassionate release requests filed from October 2019 through September 2022.
The situation is alarming because prisons are teeming with aging inmates who suffer from cancer, diabetes, and other conditions, academic researchers said. A 2021 notice from the Federal Register estimates the average cost of care per individual is about $35,000 per year. Incarcerated people with preexisting conditions are especially vulnerable to serious illness or death from covid, said Erica Zunkel, a law professor at the University of Chicago who studies compassionate release.
“Prisons are becoming nursing homes,” Zunkel said. “Who is incarceration serving at that point? Do we want a system that is humane?”
The number of applications for compassionate release began soaring in March 2020 as the Covid pandemic devastated prison populations.
But judges repeatedly denied most requests for compassionate release.
Research shows high rates of incarceration in the U.S. accelerated the spread of covid infections.
Nearly 2,500 people held in state and federal prisons died of covid from March 2020 through February 2021, according to an August report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
It is estimated that by 2030 older people will compose one-third of the entire prison population unless reforms are put in place.
Longer sentences? At one point the goals of incarceration supposedly included education and job training. I used to visit the prisons periodically, and from what I could see the State had never been able to make up its mind if it really wanted to do education and training, or if it was just about serving time.