As prisoners age, should they go free?

Charlie Perkins has spent roughly half his life - 38 years - cooped up here at the Men's Prison near Milledgeville, Ga. Yet he's tried to carve out as orderly and productive a life as possible in this world of convicts and confined spaces.

He keeps his socks and shaving gear lined up neatly in his locker. He's one of few inmates here to hold a job. Bearing his trademark brush, towel, and polish, he's the prison bootblack, shining the shoes of guards.

Now Mr. Perkins, convicted of murder in 1965, is hoping to experience one other thing in his twilight years: freedom. As part of an effort to reduce overcrowding and save money, Georgia and several other states are considering releasing elderly inmates who are no longer deemed a threat to society.

None of this means that Men's Prison, the state's premier lockup for elderly convicts, is about to the throw open its doors willy nilly. Georgia remains a law-and-order state in the law-and-order South.

Yet officials here and nationwide are start-ing to debate the idea of releasing some of the elderly and infirm, largely because of one fact: Seniors represent the fastest-growing segment of the US prison population. After a decade of "get tough" laws that have pushed the national prison population to more than 2 million, state officials are not only dealing with a lack of prison beds, they're also footing the bill for increasingly costly healthcare behind bars.

"What's happening in Georgia is a sign that the sheer numbers of older prisoners are beginning to catch up with prison officials and politicians," says Ron Aday, director of the Division of Aging at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. It's one solution to tight budgets and overcrowding - but a controversial one, especially here, where the public is ambivalent about aged criminals' plight.

Founded by the English as a penal colony, Georgia is still a tough place to be an outlaw. Most Georgians - 84 percent - approved a recent constitutional amendment to deny parole to violent repeat offenders, and many states have gotten rid of parole boards altogether in favor of truth-in-sentencing laws. Georgia had about 500 older prisoners in 1980; it now houses 4,416. Nationally, the elderly prison population has doubled in the past decade, to 121,000, about 9 percent of the nation's total.

So far, states are accommodating the aged as best they can. Pennsylvania has built a state-of-the-art geriatric care facility for its infirm prisoners. About half the states now offer hospice care for their frailest inmates. At Angola Prison in Louisiana, a team of prisoners cares for the dying, carrying coffins by horse and buggy, followed by a line of praying, singing inmates, to the prison cemetery. And in a move toward staving off some health issues, Ohio has created fitness-in-prison programs for its older inmates.

Page: 1 | 2